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

SUNUP

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

As an opener, it rules out about 83.2% of possible answers.

Meaning and pronunciation

Pronunciation: /ˈsʌnʌp/

Noun

The time of day when the sun appears above the eastern horizon.

Noun

The change in color of the sky at sunup.

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 SUNUP performs as a guess

Wordle accepts SUNUP 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 62.7% of games, misses completely in 37.3%, and leaves about 399 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #10,841 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.78 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 SUNUP 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.

3.75 Entropy (bits)
399 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
83.2% Avg ruled out
Higher first-turn entropy than about 13% of evaluated openers
2.20 bits below the highest measured first-turn entropy (~5.95 bits)

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How SUNUP 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.

3.78 Avg guesses
99.96% Solved within six
0.70 Spread of game lengths
#10,841 Rank among openers
Opening with SUNUP left 1 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 3.78 average. It ranks #10,841 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
37
3 guesses
770
4 guesses
1,239
5 guesses
288
6 guesses
19
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:
NSU

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
63%
Green tile
32%
All gray
37%

Feedback distribution

SUNUP can come back 68 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:

885 answers
239 answers
177 answers
143 answers
134 answers
99 answers
91 answers
71 answers
52 answers
45 answers
43 answers
35 answers
27 answers
24 answers
23 answers
19 answers
19 answers
18 answers
18 answers
17 answers
17 answers
16 answers
13 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers
10 answers
9 answers
8 answers
8 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

S1U1N1U1P3
Total: 7 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing SUNUP

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing SUNUP:

37% chance
Suggested:
ROATE
10% chance
Suggested:
ARIEL
7% chance
Suggested:
THALE

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

37.3%
ROATE 6.10 bits
10.1%
ARIEL 5.62 bits
7.5%
THALE 5.49 bits
6.0%
ROATE 5.54 bits
5.6%
PARTE 5.48 bits
4.2%
DROLE 4.39 bits
3.8%
CAGEY 4.64 bits
3.0%
CLOTE 5.19 bits
2.2%
IRATE 4.43 bits
1.9%
TRONE 4.01 bits

Research on SUNUP

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

Optimal play

Opening with SUNUP, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.82 guesses and ranks #11,745 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.97 guesses at best and is rank #5,653 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.

Our six-turn simulation says 3.78, at or below the proven-optimal 3.82, 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 SUHNUHP.

Rhymes with RUNUP

Related meanings

In WordNet's sense inventory, SUNUP is a kind of hour.

Synonyms morning dawn sunrise aurora daybreak

Familiarity and learning

Frequency
SUNUP 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.

In a sentence

Tom left for Boston just before sunup.
© tatoeba.org contributor CK (CC BY 2.0 FR)
Tom headed home just before sunup.
© tatoeba.org contributor CK (CC BY 2.0 FR)

Sources: Optimal-play values: Alex Selby's exhaustive Wordle analysis (MIT); Pronunciation: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (BSD); Word relations: Open English WordNet, 2025 edition (CC BY 4.0); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).