5 FiveLetterWords
Accepted guess Not a possible answer C tier for first-turn info

WHELM

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ʍɛlm//wɛlm/

Verb

To emotionally affect at an intensity in between underwhelm and overwhelm.

Noun

A surge of water.

“the whelm of the tide”

Noun

A wooden drainpipe, a hollowed out tree trunk, turned with the cavity downwards to form an arched watercourse.

Verb

To bury, to cover; to engulf, to submerge.

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

Etymology

From Middle English whelmen (“to turn over, capsize; to invert, turn upside down”), perhaps from Old English *hwealmnian, a variant of *hwealfnian, from hwealf (“arched, concave, vaulted; an arched or vaulted ceiling”), from Proto-West Germanic *hwalb, from Proto-Germanic *hwalbą (“arch, vault”), from Proto-Indo-European *kʷelp- (“to curve”).

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Related meanings

Synonyms overcome overtake overwhelm

Use WHELM in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 89.2% of possible answers.

Open Solver with WHELM Open Word Finder

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 WHELM performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WHELM 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 77.5% of games, misses completely in 22.5%, and leaves about 258 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #9,933 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.76 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.

W__L_ W in the 1st position and L in the 4th position _H__M H in the 2nd position and M in the 5th position

Explore lists that match the beginning, ending or letters in WHELM.

First-turn measures

All four describe WHELM 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.

4.19 Entropy (bits)
258 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
89.2% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WHELM 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.

3.76 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#9,933 Rank among openers
Opening with WHELM 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 3.76 average. It ranks #9,933 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
57
3 guesses
747
4 guesses
1,268
5 guesses
265
6 guesses
16

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
EL

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
78%
Green tile
22%
All gray
22%

Feedback distribution

WHELM can come back 81 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

536 answers
460 answers
202 answers
150 answers
104 answers
100 answers
83 answers
74 answers
66 answers
53 answers
49 answers
36 answers
35 answers
29 answers
25 answers
23 answers
23 answers
23 answers
22 answers
22 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4H4E1L1M3
Total: 13 points

Words With Friends

Total: 14 points

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

Try next

SAINT RAISE SONAR LEARE COAST MACRO

Strategy after playing WHELM

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WHELM:

22% chance
Suggested:
SAINT
19% chance
Suggested:
RAISE
8% chance
Suggested:
SONAR

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

22.5% →
SAINT 6.20 bits
19.3% →
RAISE 5.33 bits
8.5% →
SONAR 5.16 bits
6.3% →
LEARE 4.65 bits
4.4% →
COAST 4.89 bits
4.2% →
MACRO 4.79 bits
3.5% →
STARE 4.52 bits
3.1% →
SAURY 4.16 bits
2.8% →
TIARE 4.69 bits
2.2% →
ROAST 4.69 bits

Research on WHELM

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

Optimal play

Opening with WHELM, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.78 guesses and ranks #9,966 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.90 guesses at best and is rank #4,068 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.76, at or below the proven-optimal 3.78, 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
WHELM sits in the rare band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word few players will have met in print.

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).