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

NOWAY

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

As an opener, it rules out about 91.1% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈnəʊweɪ/

Adverb

In no manner or degree; not at all; nowise; no way.

“Noway will I go with you.”

Alternative forms: noways

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 NOWAY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts NOWAY 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 79.9% of games, misses completely in 20.1%, and leaves about 212 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #9,651 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.75 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 NOWAY 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.

4.36 Entropy (bits)
212 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.1% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 43% of evaluated openers
1.58 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How NOWAY 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.

3.75 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#9,651 Rank among openers
Opening with NOWAY left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.75 average. It ranks #9,651 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
42
3 guesses
797
4 guesses
1,223
5 guesses
277
6 guesses
13
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:
ANO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
80%
Green tile
32%
All gray
20%

Feedback distribution

NOWAY can come back 82 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

476 answers
376 answers
189 answers
163 answers
133 answers
113 answers
107 answers
88 answers
80 answers
60 answers
53 answers
43 answers
42 answers
36 answers
33 answers
26 answers
20 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
15 answers
14 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

N1O1W4A1Y4
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing NOWAY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing NOWAY:

20% chance
Suggested:
SLIER
16% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
8% chance
Suggested:
TRICE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.1%
SLIER 6.14 bits
15.8%
SLATE 5.58 bits
8.0%
TRICE 5.12 bits
6.9%
STILE 5.25 bits
5.6%
SIDLE 4.62 bits
4.8%
CRUSE 4.93 bits
4.5%
STILE 4.58 bits
3.7%
SETER 4.51 bits
3.4%
SLART 4.24 bits
2.5%
TALER 4.34 bits

Research on NOWAY

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

Optimal play

Opening with NOWAY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.78 guesses and ranks #9,668 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.93 guesses at best and is rank #4,804 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.75, at or below the proven-optimal 3.78, 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.

How it sounds

Two syllables, stress on the first syllable Say it NOWEE. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
NOWAY 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); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD), with machine estimates from the g2p_en model; Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).