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

WOLVE

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /wʊlv/

Verb

To behave like a wolf.

Verb

Of an organ, to make a hollow whining sound like that of a wolf.

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

Etymology

From inflected stem of wolf.

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use WOLVE in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.9% 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 WOLVE performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WOLVE 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 79.0% of games, misses completely in 21.0%, and leaves about 216 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #9,280 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.75 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 WOLVE 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.

4.39 Entropy (bits)
216 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.9% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WOLVE 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.

3.75 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#9,280 Rank among openers
Opening with WOLVE left 1 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 3.75 average. It ranks #9,280 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
62
3 guesses
776
4 guesses
1,229
5 guesses
270
6 guesses
16

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ELO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
35%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

WOLVE can come back 90 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

500 answers
325 answers
205 answers
188 answers
178 answers
131 answers
118 answers
65 answers
51 answers
46 answers
38 answers
34 answers
29 answers
26 answers
24 answers
24 answers
23 answers
21 answers
20 answers
20 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
13 answers
13 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
9 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4O1L1V4E1
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing WOLVE

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WOLVE:

21% chance
Suggested:
SAINT
14% chance
Suggested:
STAIR
9% chance
Suggested:
STAIR

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

21.0% →
SAINT 6.12 bits
13.6% →
STAIR 5.34 bits
8.6% →
STAIR 5.13 bits
7.9% →
SAINT 5.11 bits
7.5% →
ARSON 5.18 bits
5.5% →
SHART 4.50 bits
4.9% →
RATEL 4.48 bits
2.7% →
SAULT 4.12 bits
2.1% →
SLART 4.04 bits
1.9% →
SNARE 3.81 bits

Research on WOLVE

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

Optimal play

Opening with WOLVE, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.77 guesses and ranks #9,176 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.91 guesses at best and is rank #4,349 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.75, at or below the proven-optimal 3.77, 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
WOLVE 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).