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

PUNJI

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

As an opener, it rules out about 83.4% of possible answers.

Open Solver with PUNJI Open Word Finder

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

A sharpened stick, often made of bamboo and covered in feces or other biohazardous material, set in the ground to wound or impale enemy soldiers.

Alternative forms: panjee, panji, punjee, punjie

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 PUNJI performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PUNJI 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 64.7% of games, misses completely in 35.3%, and leaves about 394 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #12,500 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.83 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___I P in the 1st position and I in the 5th position _U__I U in the 2nd position and I in the 5th position

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

First-turn measures

All four describe PUNJI 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.

3.56 Entropy (bits)
394 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
83.4% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 8% of evaluated openers
2.39 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PUNJI 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.

3.83 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.69 Spread of game lengths
#12,500 Rank among openers
Opening with PUNJI solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.69 means those games clustered within about 0.69 of a guess of the 3.83 average. It ranks #12,500 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
33
3 guesses
676
4 guesses
1,335
5 guesses
289
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

5/5 unique
2 vowels
Common:
INU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
65%
Green tile
18%
All gray
35%

Feedback distribution

PUNJI can come back 58 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

839 answers
345 answers
187 answers
152 answers
118 answers
114 answers
106 answers
61 answers
56 answers
54 answers
42 answers
40 answers
31 answers
25 answers
22 answers
16 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
7 answers
7 answers
7 answers
6 answers
5 answers
5 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3U1N1J8I1
Total: 14 points

Words With Friends

Total: 19 points

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

Try next

TARSE SALET LEARN TORSE SAGER SLYER

Strategy after playing PUNJI

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PUNJI:

35% chance
Suggested:
TARSE
15% chance
Suggested:
SALET
8% chance
Suggested:
LEARN

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

35.3% →
TARSE 6.28 bits
14.5% →
SALET 5.29 bits
7.9% →
LEARN 5.18 bits
6.4% →
TORSE 5.37 bits
5.0% →
SAGER 4.63 bits
4.8% →
TARSE 5.54 bits
4.5% →
SLYER 4.47 bits
2.6% →
CAGEY 4.50 bits
2.4% →
TARSE 5.02 bits
2.3% →
TORSE 3.92 bits

Research on PUNJI

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

Optimal play

Opening with PUNJI, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.87 guesses and ranks #13,153 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 4.00 guesses at best and is rank #6,161 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.83, at or below the proven-optimal 3.87, 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 PUHNJEE. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
PUNJI 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 frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).