Accepted guess Not a possible answer B tier for first-turn info

WARES

WARES is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /wɛəz//wɛɹz//weːz/

Noun

plural of ware

Noun

Goods or services that are for sale.

“The square was filled with booths, with vendors offering their wares.”

Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.

How it sounds

One syllable Say it WEHRZ.

Rhymes with TEARS CARES BEARS PAIRS WEARS

Related meanings

Synonyms product WASTE warfare merchandise consume

Opposites PEACE

In a sentence

Quickly we had sold all wares.
© tatoeba.org contributor Tom9358 (CC BY 2.0 FR)
It is not difficult to sell wares here.
© tatoeba.org contributor mindfroggery (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use WARES in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 95.3% of possible answers.

Wordle status

A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.

Playable guess

Yes

Included in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.

Possible answer

No

The solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.

Past Wordle answer

No completed appearance

No appearance in our globally completed history. A recent puzzle may still be live elsewhere.

The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.

How WARES performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WARES 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 87.0% of games, misses completely in 13.0%, and leaves about 111 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #5,321 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.67 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.

All gray? Tap a tile to cycle gray → yellow → green.

First-turn measures

All four describe WARES 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.

5.18 Entropy (bits)
111 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
95.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WARES 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.

3.67 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#5,321 Rank among openers
Opening with WARES solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.67 average. It ranks #5,321 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
72
3 guesses
860
4 guesses
1,195
5 guesses
215
6 guesses
12

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AERS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
87%
Green tile
34%
All gray
13%

Feedback distribution

WARES can come back 110 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

311 answers
189 answers
141 answers
135 answers
116 answers
109 answers
105 answers
103 answers
86 answers
84 answers
81 answers
68 answers
65 answers
63 answers
45 answers
36 answers
34 answers
32 answers
30 answers
30 answers
29 answers
24 answers
22 answers
22 answers
21 answers
18 answers
18 answers
16 answers
15 answers
13 answers

Letter-value totals

Base letter-value totals for WARES; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.

Scrabble

W4A1R1E1S1
Total: 8 points

Words With Friends

Total: 8 points

Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.

Strategy after playing WARES

What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to WARES.

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WARES:

13% chance
Suggested:
COUNT
8% chance
Suggested:
TOILE
6% chance
Suggested:
SPILT

Follow-ups for common patterns

Ranked follow-up guesses for the 10 most common feedback patterns.

13.0% →
COUNT 5.67 bits
7.9% →
TOILE 5.23 bits
5.9% →
SPILT 5.01 bits
5.7% →
PLAIT 5.01 bits
4.9% →
DROIT 4.95 bits
4.6% →
DEALT 4.82 bits
4.4% →
TANGY 3.96 bits
4.3% →
TOILE 3.43 bits
3.6% →
TOILE 4.44 bits
3.5% →
TRICE 4.34 bits

Research on WARES

Game-tree analysis and word research for WARES, with an explanation for each figure.

Optimal play

Opening with WARES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.67 guesses and ranks #2,714 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 WARES can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.67; proven optimal play reaches 3.67. The fixed strategy accounts for the difference.

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
WARES sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 2 times 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 relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).