TELCO
TELCO is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
As an opener, it rules out about 95.4% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈtɛlˌkəʊ/
- Noun
-
A telephone company (historically); a telecommunications company, a telecom.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
Not used yetNo past answer date found.
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
Wordle Observatory
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How TELCO performs as a guess
Wordle accepts TELCO as a guess, but the solver does not list it as a possible answer.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 89.3% of games, misses completely in 10.7%, and leaves about 108 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,429 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.61 guesses in games solved within six turns.
Try your feedback pattern
Tap the tiles to match your feedback, then see the ranked follow-up guesses.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe TELCO used as an opening guess. Entropy is the same idea as “avg ruled out” on a log scale: a higher number means the guess splits the possible answers into more, smaller groups.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How TELCO performed in the previous complete opener benchmark, against its captured answer snapshot. These research figures are separate from today's solver recommendations. See the data page for the method.
Composition
Feedback chances
Feedback distribution
TELCO can come back 106 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing TELCO:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for TELCO; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
The science of TELCO
What game-tree analysis and word research measure about TELCO — each figure with what it means.
Optimal play
Opening with TELCO, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.63 guesses — rank #995 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.74 guesses at best — rank #203 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.61 — at or below the proven-optimal 3.63 only because the two figures score different answer lists.
These figures come from exhaustive game-tree search and are exact for the NYT lists of July 2023 (3,158 answers) — not the site's working answer pool.
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable — say it TEHLKOH.
Meaning network
In WordNet's sense inventory, TELCO is a kind of utility.
How people know it
- Frequency
- TELCO sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — an uncommon word many players still recognize.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).