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

PICON

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

As an opener, it rules out about 91.2% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A caramel-coloured flavoured bitters made from oranges, gentian, and quinquina, traditionally accompanying beer in the east and north of France.

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 PICON performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PICON 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 76.4% of games, misses completely in 23.6%, and leaves about 208 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,619 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.61 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 PICON 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.

4.62 Entropy (bits)
208 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
91.2% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 60% of evaluated openers
1.33 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PICON 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.

3.61 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#1,619 Rank among openers
Opening with PICON left 2 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 3.61 average. It ranks #1,619 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
58
3 guesses
1,002
4 guesses
1,101
5 guesses
176
6 guesses
15
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:
INO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
76%
Green tile
25%
All gray
24%

Feedback distribution

PICON can come back 102 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

560 answers
254 answers
176 answers
138 answers
135 answers
102 answers
86 answers
73 answers
62 answers
58 answers
57 answers
50 answers
46 answers
32 answers
31 answers
25 answers
25 answers
24 answers
24 answers
22 answers
21 answers
20 answers
19 answers
18 answers
16 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3I1C3O1N1
Total: 9 points

Words With Friends

Total: 12 points

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

Strategy after playing PICON

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PICON:

24% chance
Suggested:
TARSE
11% chance
Suggested:
SOREL
7% chance
Suggested:
TARSE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

23.6%
TARSE 6.30 bits
10.7%
SOREL 5.21 bits
7.4%
TARSE 5.51 bits
5.8%
CRATE 5.73 bits
5.7%
SALET 5.29 bits
4.3%
SALET 4.76 bits
3.6%
SATER 5.46 bits
3.1%
TARGE 4.45 bits
2.6%
SARED 4.30 bits
2.4%
CHARE 4.38 bits

Research on PICON

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

Optimal play

Opening with PICON, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.67 guesses and ranks #2,878 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.78 guesses at best and is rank #824 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.61, at or below the proven-optimal 3.67, 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 PIHKUHN.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
PICON 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).