WAFER
Yes, WAFER was the Wordle answer on January 9, 2025 (Wordle #1300).
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /ˈweɪ̯fəː/[ˈweɪ̯fəː]/wæɪ̯fəː/
- Noun
-
A light, thin, flat biscuit/cookie.
- Noun
-
A thin disk of consecrated unleavened bread used in communion.
- Verb
-
To seal or fasten with a wafer.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English wafre, from Anglo-Norman wafre, waufre (Old French gaufre), from a Germanic source. Compare Middle Low German wāfel, Middle Dutch wafel (“honeycomb”), West Flemish wafer. See also waffle.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it WAYFUR.
Rhymes with SAFER
In a sentence
It was a wafer-thin majority.
Ice cream cones are made of wafer.
Use WAFER in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 93.2% of possible answers.
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
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: January 9, 2025 (#1300).
See the full page for that puzzle: January 9, 2025 (#1300).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
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See what the public sample says →How WAFER performs as a guess
WAFER is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 82.8% of games, misses completely in 17.2%, and leaves about 162 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,632 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.73 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 WAFER 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 WAFER 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
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches WAFER in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
WAFER can come back 94 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for WAFER; 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.
Try next
Strategy after playing WAFER
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to WAFER.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing WAFER:
Research on WAFER
Game-tree analysis and word research for WAFER, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with WAFER, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.73 guesses and ranks #6,973 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with WAFER can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.73, at or below the proven-optimal 3.73, 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). They do not use the site's working answer pool.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- WAFER sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).