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

WICKY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈwɪki/

Noun

Sheep laurel, a shrub of species Kalmia angustifolia.

Noun

Alternative form of wicken (“European rowan tree (Sorbus aucuparia)”).

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

Use WICKY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 82.7% 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 WICKY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WICKY 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 63.4% of games, misses completely in 36.6%, and leaves about 411 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #12,855 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.84 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 WICKY 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.

3.58 Entropy (bits)
411 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
82.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WICKY 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.

3.84 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#12,855 Rank among openers
Opening with WICKY 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 3.84 average. It ranks #12,855 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
34
3 guesses
673
4 guesses
1,309
5 guesses
316
6 guesses
21

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
I

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
63%
Green tile
28%
All gray
37%

Feedback distribution

WICKY can come back 63 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

872 answers
292 answers
229 answers
210 answers
122 answers
73 answers
64 answers
59 answers
46 answers
38 answers
36 answers
35 answers
31 answers
23 answers
21 answers
21 answers
19 answers
19 answers
17 answers
13 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
9 answers
7 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers
5 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4I1C3K5Y4
Total: 17 points

Words With Friends

Total: 17 points

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

Strategy after playing WICKY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WICKY:

37% chance
Suggested:
TARSE
12% chance
Suggested:
TRINE
10% chance
Suggested:
SALEP

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

36.6% →
TARSE 6.34 bits
12.2% →
TRINE 5.41 bits
9.6% →
SALEP 4.85 bits
8.8% →
ROATE 5.67 bits
5.1% →
RONTE 4.92 bits
3.1% →
SENOR 4.94 bits
2.7% →
CLONE 4.32 bits
2.5% →
PARLE 4.71 bits
1.9% →
SLANE 4.15 bits
1.6% →
PALER 4.71 bits

Research on WICKY

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

Optimal play

Opening with WICKY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.84 guesses and ranks #12,366 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.99 guesses at best and is rank #5,994 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.84, at or below the proven-optimal 3.84, 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
WICKY 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 frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).