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

YOKED

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /joʊkt/

Adjective

Wearing a yoke.

“The yoked oxen stood ready.”

Adjective

Subjugated.

“yoked workers”

Verb

simple past and past participle of yoke

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

How it sounds

One syllable Say it YOHKT.

Rhymes with JOKED POKED

Related meanings

Synonyms couple link pair duo span BRACE

Use YOKED in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 91.1% 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 YOKED performs as a guess

Wordle accepts YOKED 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 82.3% of games, misses completely in 17.7%, and leaves about 212 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,792 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.78 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 YOKED 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.

4.28 Entropy (bits)
212 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.1% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How YOKED 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.

3.78 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.67 Spread of game lengths
#10,792 Rank among openers
Opening with YOKED solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.67 means those games clustered within about 0.67 of a guess of the 3.78 average. It ranks #10,792 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
36
3 guesses
732
4 guesses
1,317
5 guesses
255
6 guesses
14

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
EO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
82%
Green tile
27%
All gray
18%

Feedback distribution

YOKED can come back 64 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

421 answers
417 answers
202 answers
189 answers
174 answers
106 answers
84 answers
78 answers
71 answers
46 answers
45 answers
44 answers
41 answers
37 answers
33 answers
31 answers
26 answers
25 answers
23 answers
21 answers
19 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
14 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

Y4O1K5E1D2
Total: 13 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing YOKED

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing YOKED:

18% chance
Suggested:
SLANT
17% chance
Suggested:
SLART
8% chance
Suggested:
ARSON

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

17.7% →
SLANT 6.11 bits
17.5% →
SLART 5.82 bits
8.5% →
ARSON 5.23 bits
7.9% →
STAIR 4.70 bits
7.3% →
SAULT 4.83 bits
4.4% →
SHART 4.55 bits
3.5% →
SLANT 4.83 bits
3.3% →
SNORE 4.25 bits
3.0% →
GEARE 4.42 bits
1.9% →
LEARE 4.35 bits

Research on YOKED

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

Optimal play

Opening with YOKED, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.76 guesses and ranks #8,607 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 YOKED can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.78; proven optimal play reaches 3.76. The fixed strategy accounts for the difference.

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
YOKED 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 relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).