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

GOONY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 82.9% of possible answers.

Open Solver with GOONY Open Word Finder

Meaning and pronunciation

Adjective

Of or like a goon; thuggish; brutal.

Adjective

Silly, crazy, foolish, stupid, or awkward.

“After their prank was successful, the friends wore goony smiles on their faces for the rest of the day.”

Noun

a goon; a foolish, stupid, silly, or awkward person.

Noun

Alternative form of gooney (gooney bird, the black-footed albatross).

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 GOONY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts GOONY 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 61.7% of games, misses completely in 38.3%, and leaves about 407 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,524 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.77 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.

G___Y G in the 1st position and Y in the 5th position G__N_ G in the 1st position and N in the 4th position _O__Y O in the 2nd position and Y in the 5th position

Explore lists that match the beginning, ending or letters in GOONY.

First-turn measures

All four describe GOONY 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.

3.87 Entropy (bits)
407 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
82.9% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 17% of evaluated openers
2.08 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How GOONY 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.

3.77 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#10,524 Rank among openers
Opening with GOONY left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.71 means those games clustered within about 0.71 of a guess of the 3.77 average. It ranks #10,524 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
44
3 guesses
767
4 guesses
1,246
5 guesses
271
6 guesses
25
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
2 vowels
Common:
NO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
62%
Green tile
42%
All gray
38%

Feedback distribution

GOONY can come back 77 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

910 answers
208 answers
182 answers
118 answers
117 answers
100 answers
81 answers
69 answers
48 answers
40 answers
37 answers
30 answers
28 answers
28 answers
27 answers
26 answers
25 answers
21 answers
16 answers
15 answers
15 answers
13 answers
13 answers
13 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
8 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

G2O1O1N1Y4
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Try next

SLATE SLART TIARE CRATE CARSE LATER

Strategy after playing GOONY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing GOONY:

38% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
9% chance
Suggested:
SLART
8% chance
Suggested:
TIARE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

38.3% →
SLATE 6.34 bits
8.8% →
SLART 4.92 bits
7.7% →
TIARE 5.30 bits
5.0% →
CRATE 5.00 bits
4.9% →
CARSE 4.84 bits
4.2% →
LATER 5.22 bits
3.4% →
TARSE 4.77 bits
2.9% →
RAILE 5.02 bits
2.0% →
TRADE 4.76 bits
1.7% →
SLART 3.62 bits

Research on GOONY

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

Optimal play

Opening with GOONY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,713 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.99 guesses at best and is rank #6,047 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.77, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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 GOONEE. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
GOONY 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.

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).