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

PINON

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

As an opener, it rules out about 86.9% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

Alternative spelling of piñon.

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 PINON performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PINON 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 69.7% of games, misses completely in 30.3%, and leaves about 311 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #9,361 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 PINON 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.

4.02 Entropy (bits)
311 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
86.9% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 24% of evaluated openers
1.92 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PINON 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
99.87% Solved within six
0.71 Spread of game lengths
#9,361 Rank among openers
Opening with PINON left 3 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 3.75 average. It ranks #9,361 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
43
3 guesses
813
4 guesses
1,213
5 guesses
258
6 guesses
24
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:
INO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
70%
Green tile
27%
All gray
30%

Feedback distribution

PINON can come back 78 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

720 answers
324 answers
226 answers
116 answers
115 answers
106 answers
72 answers
68 answers
56 answers
52 answers
45 answers
33 answers
32 answers
31 answers
29 answers
26 answers
24 answers
24 answers
21 answers
21 answers
17 answers
16 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
7 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3I1N1O1N1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 10 points

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

Strategy after playing PINON

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PINON:

30% chance
Suggested:
REAST
14% chance
Suggested:
SOREL
10% chance
Suggested:
CRATE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

30.3%
REAST 6.27 bits
13.6%
SOREL 5.20 bits
9.5%
CRATE 5.49 bits
4.9%
SALET 4.70 bits
4.8%
LEAST 5.23 bits
4.5%
LEAST 5.44 bits
3.0%
TARGE 4.25 bits
2.9%
TALER 4.86 bits
2.4%
SLATE 5.03 bits
2.2%
DRONE 4.20 bits

Research on PINON

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

Optimal play

Opening with PINON, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.80 guesses and ranks #10,825 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.94 guesses at best and is rank #5,094 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 3.80, 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 PIHNUHN. Estimated pronunciation

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

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, PINON is a kind of pine.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
PINON 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.

In a sentence

The high, flat mountaintop is covered with many green juniper and pinon pine trees.
© tatoeba.org contributor Cangarejo (CC BY 2.0 FR)

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).