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

PONES

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of pone

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

Use PONES in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 94.5% 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 PONES performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PONES 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 86.8% of games, misses completely in 13.2%, and leaves about 131 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #1,884 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.62 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 PONES 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.

5.08 Entropy (bits)
131 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
94.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PONES 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.

3.62 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#1,884 Rank among openers
Opening with PONES left 1 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 3.62 average. It ranks #1,884 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
68
3 guesses
960
4 guesses
1,143
5 guesses
169
6 guesses
13

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ENOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
87%
Green tile
34%
All gray
13%

Feedback distribution

PONES can come back 106 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

314 answers
313 answers
156 answers
130 answers
126 answers
107 answers
101 answers
99 answers
60 answers
49 answers
44 answers
43 answers
42 answers
41 answers
38 answers
36 answers
36 answers
35 answers
33 answers
30 answers
26 answers
25 answers
24 answers
23 answers
22 answers
20 answers
19 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1N1E1S1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Strategy after playing PONES

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PONES:

13% chance
Suggested:
TRAIL
13% chance
Suggested:
REATE
7% chance
Suggested:
SHALT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

13.2% →
TRAIL 5.95 bits
13.1% →
REATE 5.57 bits
6.5% →
SHALT 5.34 bits
5.5% →
ABORT 5.21 bits
5.3% →
TALER 4.43 bits
4.5% →
CLARY 4.65 bits
4.2% →
SLART 5.01 bits
4.2% →
GRANT 5.07 bits
2.5% →
ALINE 4.40 bits
2.1% →
RAINY 3.90 bits

Research on PONES

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

Optimal play

Opening with PONES, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.63 guesses and ranks #768 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 #848 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.62, at or below the proven-optimal 3.63, 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
PONES 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).