TWAIN
TWAIN is accepted as a guess but is not on the solver's possible-answer list.
Meaning and pronunciation
Pronunciation: /tweɪn/[tʰw̥eɪn]
- Noun
-
Pair, couple.
- Verb
-
To part in twain; divide; sunder.
- Numeral
-
two
“But the warm twilight round us twain will never rise again.”
- Adjective
-
twofold
Alternative forms: twaine
Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.
Etymology
From twain, in reference to a line in Rudyard Kipling's poem The Ballad of East and West: "never the twain shall meet". This was chosen to reflect the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers.
Source: Wiktionary (CC BY-SA)
How it sounds
One syllable Say it TWAYN.
Rhymes with TRAIN BRAIN PLANE CHAIN SPAIN
Related meanings
Synonyms couple pair duo span BRACE duet
In a sentence
Your words split my heart in twain.
The sword split his skull in twain.
Use TWAIN in a puzzle
As an opener, it rules out about 93.0% of possible answers.
Wordle status
A word can be a playable guess without being a possible answer.
Playable guess
YesIncluded in the Wordle guess list used by our tools.
Possible answer
NoThe solver does not currently treat this as a possible answer.
Past Wordle answer
No completed appearanceNo 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.
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See what the public sample says →How TWAIN performs as a guess
Wordle accepts TWAIN 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 81.2% of games, misses completely in 18.8%, and leaves about 167 possible answers on average.
In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #3,443 of 14,855 openers, averaging 3.64 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.
Useful pattern pages
If you only know part of the word, start with one of these matching patterns.
First-turn measures
All four describe TWAIN 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.
As an opening guess: previous benchmark
How TWAIN 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.
Composition
Feedback chances
Feedback distribution
TWAIN can come back 106 different ways. These are the most likely, and how many of the possible answers give each one:
Letter-value totals
Base letter-value totals for TWAIN; these do not show whether either game accepts the word.
Scrabble
Words With Friends
Scores shown are base values without double/triple letter or word bonuses.
Try next
Strategy after playing TWAIN
What the solver recommends next for each way the board can respond to TWAIN.
Quick reference
Largest feedback groups after playing TWAIN:
Research on TWAIN
Game-tree analysis and word research for TWAIN, with an explanation for each figure.
Optimal play
Opening with TWAIN, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.70 guesses and ranks #5,026 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.
In hard mode it averages 3.81 guesses at best and is rank #1,781 of the 7,453 openers that can still guarantee a solve within six guesses.
Our six-turn simulation says 3.64, at or below the proven-optimal 3.70, 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
- TWAIN sits in the intermediate band of the wordfreq scale, appearing about 2 times per million words of written English; the band marks it as a word most readers meet regularly.
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).