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

POONS

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

As an opener, it rules out about 86.7% of possible answers.

Open Solver with POONS Open Word Finder

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of poon

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 POONS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts POONS 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 68.3% of games, misses completely in 31.7%, and leaves about 315 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,432 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.73 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.
See strategy patterns

Useful pattern pages

If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.

P___S P in the 1st position and S in the 5th position P__N_ P in the 1st position and N in the 4th position _O__S O in the 2nd position and S in the 5th position

Explore lists that match the beginning, ending or letters in POONS.

First-turn measures

All four describe POONS 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.

4.09 Entropy (bits)
315 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
86.7% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 27% of evaluated openers
1.86 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How POONS 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.

3.73 Avg guesses
99.92% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#8,432 Rank among openers
Opening with POONS left 2 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.70 means those games clustered within about 0.70 of a guess of the 3.73 average. It ranks #8,432 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
46
3 guesses
830
4 guesses
1,213
5 guesses
242
6 guesses
21
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:
NOS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
68%
Green tile
33%
All gray
32%

Feedback distribution

POONS can come back 79 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

752 answers
287 answers
189 answers
133 answers
93 answers
88 answers
80 answers
72 answers
66 answers
65 answers
43 answers
41 answers
39 answers
31 answers
30 answers
28 answers
23 answers
18 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
16 answers
14 answers
13 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3O1O1N1S1
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 9 points

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

Try next

RAILE SLATE AINEE CARLE TALER TARGE

Strategy after playing POONS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing POONS:

32% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
12% chance
Suggested:
SLATE
8% chance
Suggested:
AINEE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

31.7% →
RAILE 6.24 bits
12.1% →
SLATE 5.68 bits
8.0% →
AINEE 5.17 bits
5.6% →
CARLE 4.83 bits
3.9% →
TALER 5.06 bits
3.7% →
TARGE 4.84 bits
3.4% →
ARIEL 5.21 bits
3.0% →
ALURE 4.66 bits
2.8% →
TUILE 4.81 bits
2.7% →
TIARE 4.85 bits

Research on POONS

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

Optimal play

Opening with POONS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.76 guesses and ranks #8,860 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.88 guesses at best and is rank #3,808 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.73, at or below the proven-optimal 3.76, 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

One syllable Say it POONZ. Estimated pronunciation

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

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, POONS is a kind of wood or tree.

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
POONS 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), 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).