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

IPPON

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

The highest score in judo, awarded for a throw that places the opponent on their back with impetus or for holding the opponent on their back for a number of seconds.

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

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 一本 (“one full point”).

Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)

Use IPPON in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 85.7% 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 IPPON performs as a guess

Wordle accepts IPPON 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 69.7% of games, misses completely in 30.3%, and leaves about 340 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #11,791 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.80 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 IPPON 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.

3.75 Entropy (bits)
340 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.7% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How IPPON 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.

3.80 Avg guesses
99.83% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#11,791 Rank among openers
Opening with IPPON left 4 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 3.80 average. It ranks #11,791 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
38
3 guesses
726
4 guesses
1,269
5 guesses
292
6 guesses
25

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
INO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
70%
Green tile
16%
All gray
30%

Feedback distribution

IPPON can come back 65 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

723 answers
332 answers
325 answers
169 answers
111 answers
104 answers
73 answers
68 answers
41 answers
37 answers
35 answers
33 answers
33 answers
30 answers
22 answers
20 answers
19 answers
15 answers
14 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
8 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
7 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

I1P3P3O1N1
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing IPPON

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing IPPON:

30% chance
Suggested:
REAST
14% chance
Suggested:
SALET
14% chance
Suggested:
SOREL

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

30.3% →
REAST 6.28 bits
13.9% →
SALET 5.33 bits
13.6% →
SOREL 5.20 bits
7.1% →
LEAST 5.28 bits
4.7% →
SLATE 5.61 bits
4.4% →
SEITY 4.31 bits
3.1% →
TRONE 4.34 bits
2.9% →
TALER 4.86 bits
1.7% →
SOOTE 4.03 bits
1.6% →
PRICE 4.26 bits

Research on IPPON

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

Optimal play

Opening with IPPON, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.85 guesses and ranks #12,724 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.97 guesses at best and is rank #5,729 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.80, at or below the proven-optimal 3.85, 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
IPPON 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).