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

BANNS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /bænz/

Noun

The announcement of a forthcoming marriage (legally required for a church wedding in England and Wales and read on the three Sundays preceding the marriage).

Noun

Any public announcement of an upcoming event.

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

Use BANNS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 88.3% 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 BANNS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts BANNS 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 72.9% of games, misses completely in 27.1%, and leaves about 280 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,098 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.76 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 BANNS 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.

4.02 Entropy (bits)
280 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
88.3% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How BANNS 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.

3.76 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#10,098 Rank among openers
Opening with BANNS left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.76 average. It ranks #10,098 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
34
3 guesses
776
4 guesses
1,267
5 guesses
261
6 guesses
14

Composition

4/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ANS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
73%
Green tile
31%
All gray
27%

Feedback distribution

BANNS can come back 67 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

647 answers
293 answers
285 answers
159 answers
131 answers
106 answers
76 answers
70 answers
65 answers
45 answers
44 answers
37 answers
35 answers
34 answers
31 answers
27 answers
26 answers
24 answers
23 answers
21 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
7 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

B3A1N1N1S1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing BANNS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing BANNS:

27% chance
Suggested:
TOILE
12% chance
Suggested:
ALERT
12% chance
Suggested:
STIRE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

27.1% →
TOILE 6.01 bits
12.3% →
ALERT 5.57 bits
12.0% →
STIRE 5.48 bits
6.7% →
TRICE 4.64 bits
5.5% →
THALE 4.73 bits
4.4% →
INTER 5.02 bits
3.2% →
TOILE 5.15 bits
2.9% →
GOIER 4.69 bits
2.7% →
COURE 4.41 bits
1.9% →
GRICE 4.56 bits

Research on BANNS

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

Optimal play

Opening with BANNS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.80 guesses and ranks #10,779 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 BANNS can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.76, at or below the proven-optimal 3.80, 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
BANNS 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).