YEAST
Yes, YEAST was the Wordle answer on May 10, 2025 (Wordle #1421).
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /jiːst//jist//iːst/
- Noun
-
An often humid, yellowish froth produced by fermenting malt worts, and used to brew beer, leaven bread, and also used in certain medicines.
- Noun
-
A single-celled fungus of any of a wide variety of taxonomic families.
- Verb
-
To ferment.
- Verb
-
To rise.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Middle English yest, yeest, gest, gist, from Old English ġist, ġyst, from Proto-West Germanic *jestu, from Proto-Germanic *jestuz. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Jääst (“yeast”), West Frisian gêst, gist (“yeast”), Dutch gist (“yeast”), German Low German Gest (“yeast”), German Gischt (“sea foam”), Swedish jäst (“yeast”), Norwegian jest (“yeast”), Icelandic jöstur (“yeast”).
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it YEEST.
In a sentence
Yeast is used in making beer.
Yeast is used in making bread.
Use YEAST in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 95.9% of possible answers.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: May 10, 2025 (#1421).
See the full page for that puzzle: May 10, 2025 (#1421).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
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See what the public sample says →How YEAST performs as a guess
YEAST is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,384 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 90.7% of games, misses completely in 9.3%, and leaves about 98 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,676 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.63 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe YEAST 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How YEAST 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches YEAST in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
YEAST can come back 106 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for YEAST; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing YEAST
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to YEAST.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing YEAST:
Research on YEAST
Game-tree analysis and word research for YEAST, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with YEAST, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.66 guesses and ranks #2,188 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 YEAST can guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.63, at or below the proven-optimal 3.66, 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
- YEAST sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 5 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Age of acquisition
- Typically learned around age 10, by Glasgow Norms speaker ratings.
- Imageability
- Imageability score: 60 of 100. Raters gave it a middle-range score.
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); Glasgow Norms (CC BY 4.0).