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

NONES

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

As an opener, it rules out about 92.4% of possible answers.

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.

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 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 180 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.

All gray? Tap a tile to cycle gray → yellow → green.

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.

4.48 Entropy (bits)
180 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.4% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 50% of evaluated openers
1.47 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

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.

3.78 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#10,925 Rank among openers
Opening with NONES left 1 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 3.78 average. It ranks #10,925 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
47
3 guesses
741
4 guesses
1,265
5 guesses
278
6 guesses
22
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:
ENOS

Feedback chances

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

Feedback distribution

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

384 answers
360 answers
199 answers
154 answers
150 answers
127 answers
120 answers
105 answers
54 answers
53 answers
47 answers
44 answers
44 answers
43 answers
42 answers
38 answers
36 answers
27 answers
24 answers
23 answers
23 answers
22 answers
17 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
14 answers
14 answers
10 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

N1O1N1E1S1
Total: 5 points

Words With Friends

Total: 7 points

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

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:

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.

16.2%
TRAIL 5.92 bits
15.2%
REATE 5.56 bits
8.4%
SLART 5.28 bits
6.5%
ALTER 4.31 bits
6.3%
ACTOR 5.00 bits
5.3%
SLART 5.05 bits
5.1%
CLARY 4.63 bits
4.4%
GRANT 5.04 bits
2.3%
DROLE 4.10 bits
2.2%
ALINE 4.43 bits

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.

How it sounds

One syllable Say it NOHNZ. Estimated pronunciation

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

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, NONES is a kind of hour.

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); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0); Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms (CC BY 4.0).