Word of the Day · Thursday, June 15, 2023
/ʃɜːt/noun
An article of clothing that is worn on the upper part of the body, and often has sleeves, either long or short, that cover the arms.
“It can take a while to learn how to iron a shirt properly.”
SHIRT is a 5-letter word with 1 vowel (I) and 4 consonants (S, H, R, T). Every letter is distinct, so it rarely punishes a clean opening guess.
It leans on high-frequency letters (S, I, R, T), so a strong vowel-and-common-consonant opener tends to light up quickly. There are no rare letters here, so it is a fair, mid-difficulty answer for the daily Classic puzzle.
Across the 1,734 curated answers in the Wordocious bank, R appears in 37% of answers (the 3rd most common letter), T appears in 30% of answers (the 4th most common letter), I appears in 29% of answers (the 6th most common letter). 41 other answers share the opening “SH-”, so two green tiles up front still leave real guessing to do.
Difficulty: 2/5 — approachable, because 4+ near-miss answers compete for the same greens.
One letter away in the answer bank: SHIRE, SHIFT, SHORT, SKIRT. Each of these turns four tiles green against SHIRT — the classic endgame squeeze where spending a guess on the differing letter beats burning attempts on hope.
Words like SHIRT are exactly what the daily puzzles throw at you. Warm up in Practice, race the clock in the Daily Challenge, or study the best starting words before your next run. New to the multi-board modes? The mode guides cover all nine.
Definitions adapted from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API (CC BY-SA). Letter statistics, difficulty ratings, and near-miss analysis are original Wordocious research computed from our curated answer list.