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

WELKE

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

As an opener, it rules out about 86.5% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Proper noun

A surname.

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

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

Not used yet

No past answer date found.

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

How WELKE performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WELKE 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 68.7% of games, misses completely in 31.3%, and leaves about 319 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #11,873 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.81 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 WELKE 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.

3.96 Entropy (bits)
319 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
86.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 21% of evaluated openers
1.99 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WELKE 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.

3.81 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#11,873 Rank among openers
Opening with WELKE left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.81 average. It ranks #11,873 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
41
3 guesses
719
4 guesses
1,259
5 guesses
322
6 guesses
12
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.45 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
EL

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
69%
Green tile
34%
All gray
31%

Feedback distribution

WELKE can come back 70 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

739 answers
248 answers
236 answers
219 answers
108 answers
74 answers
71 answers
68 answers
60 answers
46 answers
37 answers
33 answers
31 answers
31 answers
30 answers
26 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
16 answers
16 answers
14 answers
13 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
9 answers
9 answers

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WELKE:

31% chance
Suggested:
ROAST
11% chance
Suggested:
SAINT
10% chance
Suggested:
ROAST

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

31.3%
ROAST 5.99 bits
10.5%
SAINT 5.07 bits
10.0%
ROAST 5.16 bits
9.3%
SONAR 5.07 bits
4.6%
SHART 4.77 bits
3.1%
PANEL 4.33 bits
3.0%
COAST 4.76 bits
2.9%
SLANT 4.10 bits
2.5%
SOILY 4.41 bits
1.9%
SONAR 4.50 bits

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4E1L1K5E1
Total: 12 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

The science of WELKE

What game-tree analysis and word research measure about WELKE — each figure with what it means.

Optimal play

Opening with WELKE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses — rank #11,631 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.97 guesses at best — rank #5,642 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.81 — at or below the proven-optimal 3.82 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

One syllable — say it WEHLK.

How people know it

Frequency
WELKE sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English — a word few players will have met in print.

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).