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

PIONS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of pion

Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.

Use PIONS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 92.6% of possible answers.

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

No completed appearance

No 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.

How PIONS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PIONS 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 79.4% of games, misses completely in 20.6%, and leaves about 176 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #781 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.59 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 PIONS 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.

4.80 Entropy (bits)
176 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
92.6% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PIONS 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.

3.59 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#781 Rank among openers
Opening with PIONS solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.68 means those games clustered within about 0.68 of a guess of the 3.59 average. It ranks #781 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
58
3 guesses
1,029
4 guesses
1,095
5 guesses
157
6 guesses
15

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
INOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
79%
Green tile
31%
All gray
21%

Feedback distribution

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

492 answers
213 answers
210 answers
167 answers
105 answers
94 answers
92 answers
63 answers
61 answers
56 answers
51 answers
51 answers
48 answers
45 answers
42 answers
34 answers
33 answers
33 answers
28 answers
21 answers
21 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
15 answers
14 answers
14 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3I1O1N1S1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing PIONS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PIONS:

21% chance
Suggested:
CARLE
9% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
9% chance
Suggested:
TALER

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.6% →
CARLE 6.18 bits
8.9% →
SLATE 5.69 bits
8.8% →
TALER 5.36 bits
7.0% →
CRATE 5.64 bits
4.4% →
LAREE 5.20 bits
3.9% →
RATEL 4.70 bits
3.9% →
BLARE 4.66 bits
2.6% →
LATER 4.58 bits
2.6% →
CARLE 5.10 bits
2.3% →
THALE 4.52 bits

Research on PIONS

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

Optimal play

Opening with PIONS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.66 guesses and ranks #2,135 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.77 guesses at best and is rank #581 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.59, at or below the proven-optimal 3.66, 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.

Familiarity and learning

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