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

WUSSY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 79.1% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈwʊsi/

Adjective

Weak or timid.

Noun

A wuss; a person who refuses to perform a particular task due to an unreasonable fear.

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 WUSSY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WUSSY 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 57.7% of games, misses completely in 42.3%, and leaves about 497 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #14,078 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.91 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 WUSSY 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.

3.36 Entropy (bits)
497 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
79.1% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 5% of evaluated openers
2.59 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WUSSY 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.

3.91 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.74 Spread of game lengths
#14,078 Rank among openers
Opening with WUSSY solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.74 means those games clustered within about 0.74 of a guess of the 3.91 average. It ranks #14,078 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
31
3 guesses
636
4 guesses
1,244
5 guesses
409
6 guesses
34
Top-ranked in the current bounded policy screen: SLANT. The policy minimizes misses within six first, then average guesses among wins (3.46 for the leader). Compare the ranking measures

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
SU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
58%
Green tile
31%
All gray
42%

Feedback distribution

WUSSY can come back 54 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

1004 answers
242 answers
214 answers
176 answers
103 answers
79 answers
61 answers
60 answers
55 answers
44 answers
42 answers
33 answers
32 answers
32 answers
25 answers
17 answers
15 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers
8 answers
6 answers
5 answers
4 answers
3 answers
3 answers
3 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4U1S1S1Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing WUSSY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WUSSY:

42% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
10% chance
Suggested:
PLATE
9% chance
Suggested:
TALER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

42.3%
ARIEL 6.12 bits
10.2%
PLATE 5.45 bits
9.0%
TALER 4.90 bits
7.4%
TRONE 5.44 bits
4.3%
LATER 4.75 bits
3.3%
ROATE 5.04 bits
2.6%
TRONE 4.79 bits
2.5%
STUNK 4.16 bits
2.3%
RAINE 4.84 bits
1.9%
MARLE 3.02 bits

Research on WUSSY

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

Optimal play

Opening with WUSSY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.92 guesses and ranks #14,179 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with WUSSY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.91, at or below the proven-optimal 3.92, 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.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it WUHSEE. Estimated pronunciation

This pronunciation is machine-estimated, not taken from a pronunciation dictionary.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
WUSSY 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.

In a sentence

He wasn't too scared to do it--he was no wussy!
© tatoeba.org contributor mccarras (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).