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

WICCA

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈwɪkə/[ˈwɪkə]

Proper noun

A neopagan religion that was first popularized by books written in 1949, 1954, and 1959 by the Englishman Gerald Gardner, involving the worship of a horned male god and a moon goddess, the observance of eight Sabbats, and the performance of various rituals.

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

Etymology

A twentieth-century borrowing of Old English wiċċa (“male witch”) (from Proto-West Germanic *wikkō (“sorcerer”)) with a spelling pronunciation. The modern use of the term was introduced first as Wica, mentioned briefly in the tenth chapter of Gerald Gardner's book Witchcraft Today (1954), as a collective noun ("the Wica"), allegedly used as a self-designation by practitioners of witchcraft.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it WIHKUH.

Use WICCA in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 85.3% 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 WICCA performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WICCA 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 72.4% of games, misses completely in 27.6%, and leaves about 351 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #13,481 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.87 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 WICCA 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.

3.64 Entropy (bits)
351 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WICCA 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.

3.87 Avg guesses
99.87% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#13,481 Rank among openers
Opening with WICCA left 3 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.87 average. It ranks #13,481 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
34
3 guesses
661
4 guesses
1,263
5 guesses
370
6 guesses
23

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
AI

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
72%
Green tile
22%
All gray
28%

Feedback distribution

WICCA can come back 59 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

658 answers
530 answers
246 answers
148 answers
94 answers
86 answers
85 answers
58 answers
56 answers
47 answers
40 answers
39 answers
33 answers
29 answers
18 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
15 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4I1C3C3A1
Total: 12 points

Words With Friends

Total: 14 points

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

Strategy after playing WICCA

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WICCA:

28% chance
Suggested:
SOREL
22% chance
Suggested:
TARSE
10% chance
Suggested:
TRINE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

27.6% →
SOREL 6.05 bits
22.2% →
TARSE 5.56 bits
10.3% →
TRINE 5.45 bits
6.2% →
RONTE 4.75 bits
3.9% →
NADIR 4.57 bits
3.6% →
SOREL 4.74 bits
3.6% →
SOREL 5.25 bits
2.4% →
SOREL 4.67 bits
2.3% →
ROUTE 4.45 bits
2.0% →
LOURE 4.41 bits

Research on WICCA

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

Optimal play

Opening with WICCA, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.89 guesses and ranks #13,722 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.02 guesses at best and is rank #6,505 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.87, at or below the proven-optimal 3.89, 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
WICCA sits in the advanced band of the wordfreq scale, appearing less than once per million words of written English; the band marks it as an uncommon word many players still recognize.

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).