NONES
NONES is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /nəʊnz//nʌnz/
- Noun
-
The divine office appointed to the hour.
“The Greek monks always listen to their reader recite Psalms 83, 84, and 85 from the Septuagint at nones.”
- Noun
-
Alternative form of Nones: atheists or those without religious affiliation.
Alternative forms: Non.
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From Latin nōnus (“ninth”). As a day of the Roman calendar, via nōnae (“ninth days”) from the original Roman practice of counting forward to the next full or new crescent moon, the nones' occurrence 8 days before the ides of every month (9 counting inclusively) following the establishment of a fixed calendar, and from the Latin practice of treating most recurring calendrical days as plurals.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
Use NONES in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 92.4% of possible answers.
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
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How NONES performs as a guess
Wordle accepts NONES 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 83.8% of games, misses completely in 16.2%, and leaves about 181 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,925 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe NONES 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 NONES 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
Feedback distribution
NONES can come back 73 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 NONES; 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 NONES
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to NONES.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing NONES:
Research on NONES
Game-tree analysis and word research for NONES, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with NONES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.77 guesses and ranks #9,465 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 NONES 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.
Familiarity and learning
- Frequency
- NONES 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.
- Dominant sense
- Lancaster raters associated it most strongly with sight (1.7 of 5).
Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).