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

JONES

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

As an opener, it rules out about 92.5% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /d͡ʒoʊnz/

Noun

An addiction or intense craving.

“I’ve got a basketball jones!”

Verb

To have an intense craving for something.

“I’m jonesing for some basketball.”

Verb

To binge on cocaine or alcohol.

Noun

Heroin.

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 JONES performs as a guess

Wordle accepts JONES 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 84.0% of games, misses completely in 16.0%, and leaves about 178 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #11,008 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.78 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 JONES 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.

4.46 Entropy (bits)
178 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.5% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 49% of evaluated openers
1.48 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How JONES 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.

3.78 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#11,008 Rank among openers
Opening with JONES solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.78 average. It ranks #11,008 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
48
3 guesses
728
4 guesses
1,283
5 guesses
275
6 guesses
20
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

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ENOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
84%
Green tile
30%
All gray
16%

Feedback distribution

JONES can come back 73 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

379 answers
354 answers
199 answers
153 answers
146 answers
127 answers
119 answers
111 answers
64 answers
53 answers
51 answers
48 answers
47 answers
46 answers
42 answers
40 answers
37 answers
27 answers
26 answers
25 answers
23 answers
21 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
12 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

J8O1N1E1S1
Total: 12 points

Words With Friends

Total: 15 points

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

Strategy after playing JONES

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing JONES:

16% chance
Suggested:
TRAIL
15% chance
Suggested:
REATE
8% chance
Suggested:
SLART

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

16.0%
TRAIL 5.94 bits
14.9%
REATE 5.57 bits
8.4%
SLART 5.28 bits
6.4%
ALTER 4.32 bits
6.1%
ACTOR 5.03 bits
5.3%
SLART 5.05 bits
5.0%
CLARY 4.65 bits
4.7%
GRANT 5.08 bits
2.7%
INANE 4.40 bits
2.2%
DROLE 4.09 bits

Research on JONES

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

Optimal play

Opening with JONES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.77 guesses and ranks #9,270 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 JONES can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.78; proven optimal play reaches 3.77. The fixed strategy accounts for the difference.

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

One syllable Say it JOHNZ.

Rhymes with LOANS BONES ZONES TONES CONES

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
JONES sits in the common band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 54 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as an everyday word almost every player will know.

In a sentence

My last name is Jones.
© tatoeba.org contributor lukaszpp (CC BY 2.0 FR)
Is Mr Jones in the office?
© tatoeba.org contributor mamat (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).