5 FiveLetterWords
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.

As an opener, it rules out about 85.7% of possible answers.

Open Solver with IPPON Open Word Finder

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.

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 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 339 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

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

I___N I in the 1st position and N in the 5th position I__O_ I in the 1st position and O in the 4th position _P__N P in the 2nd position and N in the 5th position

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

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)
339 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
85.7% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 13% of evaluated openers
2.20 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

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
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:
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:

720 answers
331 answers
324 answers
169 answers
107 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
14 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.

Try next

REAST SALET SOREL LEAST SLATE SEITY

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 6.27 bits
13.9% →
SALET 5.33 bits
13.6% →
SOREL 5.20 bits
7.1% →
LEAST 5.28 bits
4.5% →
SLATE 5.65 bits
4.4% →
SEITY 4.31 bits
3.1% →
RONTE 4.37 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.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it IHPUHN. Estimated pronunciation

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

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); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).