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

WHENS

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

Meaning and pronunciation

Noun

plural of when

Source: Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0. Corrections.

Use WHENS in a puzzle

As an opener, it rules out about 90.4% of possible answers.

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

No completed appearance

No 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.

How WHENS performs as a guess

Wordle accepts WHENS 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 79.9% of games, misses completely in 20.1%, and leaves about 230 possible answers on average.

In the previous complete opener benchmark, it ranks #8,641 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.

First-turn measures

All four describe WHENS 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.

4.40 Entropy (bits)
230 Avg remaining
0.0% Exact match
90.4% Avg ruled out

As an opening guess: previous benchmark

How WHENS 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
99.96% Solved within six
0.72 Spread of game lengths
#8,641 Rank among openers
Opening with WHENS left 1 of the snapshot's answers unsolved after six guesses. A spread of 0.72 means those games clustered within about 0.72 of a guess of the 3.73 average. It ranks #8,641 of 14,855 openers by average guesses in games solved within six.
1 guess
0
2 guesses
62
3 guesses
804
4 guesses
1,211
5 guesses
253
6 guesses
23

Composition

5/5 unique
1 vowels
Common:
ENS

Feedback chances

Any hit (G/Y)
80%
Green tile
23%
All gray
20%

Feedback distribution

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

480 answers
452 answers
192 answers
128 answers
119 answers
108 answers
95 answers
88 answers
63 answers
45 answers
34 answers
32 answers
32 answers
27 answers
27 answers
26 answers
26 answers
25 answers
24 answers
24 answers
21 answers
18 answers
17 answers
16 answers
16 answers
13 answers
12 answers
11 answers
11 answers
11 answers

Letter-value totals

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

Scrabble

W4H4E1N1S1
Total: 11 points

Words With Friends

Total: 11 points

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

Strategy after playing WHENS

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

Quick reference

Largest feedback groups after playing WHENS:

20% chance
Suggested:
CAROL
19% chance
Suggested:
RAILE
8% chance
Suggested:
SLART

Follow-ups for common patterns

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

20.1% →
CAROL 5.88 bits
19.0% →
RAILE 5.40 bits
8.1% →
SLART 5.23 bits
5.4% →
STAIR 4.88 bits
5.0% →
TONIC 5.06 bits
4.5% →
AINEE 4.62 bits
4.0% →
TORCH 4.95 bits
3.7% →
LAIRY 4.22 bits
2.6% →
TRADE 4.31 bits
1.9% →
CARTE 4.73 bits

Research on WHENS

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

Optimal play

Opening with WHENS, a proven-optimal strategy averages 3.77 guesses and ranks #9,144 of 14,855 legal openers. The best proven opener, TARSE, averages 3.55.

In hard mode it averages 3.89 guesses at best and is rank #4,027 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 3.77, 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
WHENS 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); Word frequency: wordfreq (data CC BY-SA 4.0).