MOURN
Yes, MOURN was the Wordle answer on March 3, 2022 (Wordle #257).
As an opener, it rules out about 92.1% of possible answers.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /mɔɹn//mɔːn//mo(ː)ɹn/
- Verb
-
To express sadness or sorrow for; to grieve over (especially a death).
“For two months, she mourned her father's passing.”
- Verb
-
To engage in the social customs of mourning; to commemorate a death and/or honour the deceased socially.
“In that society, a spouse is mourned for one year, a parent for six months.”
- Noun
-
Sorrow, grief.
- Noun
-
A ring fitted upon the head of a lance to prevent wounding an adversary in tilting.
Alternative forms: morne
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
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
YesIncluded among the answers considered by the solver.
Past Wordle answer
Used oncePast Wordle answer: March 3, 2022 (#257).
See the full page for that puzzle: March 3, 2022 (#257).
The possible-answer list is the solver's current list and may change when Wordle adds new answers.
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See what the public sample says →How MOURN performs as a guess
MOURN is a possible answer, so it would solve about one game in 2,374 when every answer is treated as equally likely.
Played as an opener, it lands at least one colored tile in 78.6% of games, misses completely in 21.4%, and leaves about 188 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #2,584 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.63 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe MOURN 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How MOURN 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Example solver route
One example route used by the solver.
This solver benchmark reaches MOURN in 4 guesses.
Feedback distribution
MOURN can come back 99 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for MOURN; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing MOURN
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to MOURN.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing MOURN:
Research on MOURN
Game-tree analysis and word research for MOURN, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with MOURN, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.68 guesses and ranks #3,543 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.81 guesses at best and is rank #1,704 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.63, at or below the proven-optimal 3.68, 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.
Related meanings
In WordNet's sense inventory, MOURN is a kind of sorrow or keep.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- MOURN sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 3 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
- Learner level
- Appears in intermediate learner vocabulary (CEFR-J level B1); a word learners usually reach after the basics.
In a sentence
We need time to mourn.
All the tribes shall mourn.
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Learner levels: CEFR-J Wordlist ver 1.5, Tono Laboratory, TUFS.