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

NGONI

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A West African stringed instrument, shaped like a guitar.

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

Use NGONI in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 84.6% 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 NGONI performs as a guess

Wordle accepts NGONI 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 66.9% of games, misses completely in 33.1%, and leaves about 367 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #12,319 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.82 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 NGONI 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.

3.69 Entropy (bits)
367 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
84.6% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How NGONI 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.

3.82 Avg guesses
99.83% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#12,319 Rank among openers
Opening with NGONI left 4 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.82 average. It ranks #12,319 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
38
3 guesses
687
4 guesses
1,302
5 guesses
307
6 guesses
16

Composition

4/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
INO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
67%
Green tile
20%
All gray
33%

Feedback distribution

NGONI can come back 64 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

790 answers
354 answers
240 answers
159 answers
109 answers
95 answers
82 answers
57 answers
55 answers
46 answers
45 answers
32 answers
29 answers
24 answers
22 answers
20 answers
20 answers
18 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers
13 answers
13 answers
13 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers
7 answers
6 answers
6 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

N1G2O1N1I1
Total: 6 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing NGONI

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing NGONI:

33% chance
Suggested:
REAST
15% chance
Suggested:
STILE
10% chance
Suggested:
TALER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

33.1% →
REAST 6.33 bits
14.8% →
STILE 5.34 bits
10.1% →
TALER 5.41 bits
6.7% →
SLART 4.84 bits
4.6% →
SAREE 4.99 bits
4.0% →
GLARE 5.12 bits
3.4% →
CATER 4.56 bits
2.4% →
LEAST 4.77 bits
2.3% →
MATEY 4.41 bits
1.9% →
TRIDE 4.42 bits

Research on NGONI

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

Optimal play

Opening with NGONI, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.88 guesses and ranks #13,380 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.01 guesses at best and is rank #6,380 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.82, at or below the proven-optimal 3.88, 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
NGONI 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).