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

PONEY

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

Alternative form of pone.

Noun

Archaic form of pony (“small horse”).

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

In a sentence

They asked for a poney.
© tatoeba.org contributor Ussis (CC BY 2.0 FR)
They finally got a poney.
© tatoeba.org contributor Ussis (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Use PONEY in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 93.5% 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 PONEY performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PONEY 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 85.9% of games, misses completely in 14.1%, and leaves about 155 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #3,616 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.65 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 PONEY 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.

4.89 Entropy (bits)
155 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
93.5% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PONEY 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.

3.65 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.68 Spread of game lengths
#3,616 Rank among openers
Opening with PONEY 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 3.65 average. It ranks #3,616 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
65
3 guesses
904
4 guesses
1,195
5 guesses
177
6 guesses
13

Composition

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
ENO

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
86%
Green tile
43%
All gray
14%

Feedback distribution

PONEY can come back 107 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

369 answers
335 answers
161 answers
148 answers
141 answers
123 answers
83 answers
65 answers
61 answers
52 answers
50 answers
49 answers
45 answers
45 answers
40 answers
35 answers
29 answers
28 answers
26 answers
26 answers
25 answers
23 answers
22 answers
22 answers
21 answers
21 answers
20 answers
18 answers
17 answers
13 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1N1E1Y4
Total: 10 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing PONEY

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PONEY:

15% chance
Suggested:
SLART
14% chance
Suggested:
SLART
7% chance
Suggested:
ACTOR

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

15.5% →
SLART 5.82 bits
14.1% →
SLART 6.09 bits
6.8% →
ACTOR 5.04 bits
6.2% →
STAIR 4.70 bits
5.9% →
SLART 4.74 bits
5.2% →
STAIR 5.19 bits
3.5% →
SHART 4.71 bits
2.7% →
ANISE 4.62 bits
2.6% →
SLART 4.14 bits
2.2% →
SLART 5.29 bits

Research on PONEY

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

Optimal play

Opening with PONEY, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.66 guesses and ranks #2,152 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

No guaranteed hard-mode solve In hard mode, no strategy that opens with PONEY can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.65, 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
PONEY 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).