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

PWNED

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

As an opener, it rules out about 89.3% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /əʊnd//pəʊnd//pəʔˈəʊnd/

Verb

simple past and past participle of pwn

Alternative forms: pwnt, pwnd, pwn3d

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 PWNED performs as a guess

Wordle accepts PWNED 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 74.7% of games, misses completely in 25.3%, and leaves about 254 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #4,813 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.67 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 PWNED 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.

4.32 Entropy (bits)
254 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
89.3% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 40% of evaluated openers
1.63 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How PWNED 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.

3.67 Avg guesses
100% Solved within six
0.67 Spread of game lengths
#4,813 Rank among openers
Opening with PWNED solved every answer in the snapshot within six guesses. A spread of 0.67 means those games clustered within about 0.67 of a guess of the 3.67 average. It ranks #4,813 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
61
3 guesses
865
4 guesses
1,232
5 guesses
189
6 guesses
7
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
1 vowels
Common:
EN

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
75%
Green tile
29%
All gray
25%

Feedback distribution

PWNED can come back 94 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

600 answers
382 answers
170 answers
140 answers
92 answers
80 answers
79 answers
78 answers
67 answers
53 answers
49 answers
44 answers
42 answers
40 answers
35 answers
26 answers
23 answers
23 answers
22 answers
22 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
14 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
12 answers
11 answers
10 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

P3W4N1E1D2
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 13 points

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

Strategy after playing PWNED

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing PWNED:

25% chance
Suggested:
ROAST
16% chance
Suggested:
SLART
7% chance
Suggested:
SAINT

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

25.3%
ROAST 6.01 bits
16.1%
SLART 5.88 bits
7.2%
SAINT 5.46 bits
5.9%
SOLAR 4.59 bits
3.9%
SLART 5.32 bits
3.4%
RAINE 4.52 bits
3.3%
GEARE 4.68 bits
3.3%
DAILY 4.91 bits
2.8%
COALY 4.37 bits
2.2%
SOILY 4.40 bits

Research on PWNED

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

Optimal play

Opening with PWNED, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.71 guesses and ranks #5,426 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 PWNED can guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.67, at or below the proven-optimal 3.71, 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 WUHND. Estimated pronunciation

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

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
PWNED 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).