A simple nonspectral model for wind waves is proposed. It is found that a model based on a single 'carrier' wave with random phase shifts between groups reproduces the essential characteristics of the autocorrelation function of real wind waves. It is not purported to be a general wind-wave model but is used simply to explain the statistical significance of the tail of the correlation function and to obtain good masking functions for the computation of smoothed wave spectra. Engineering applications of such simple wave models are briefly discussed.