Wordle Solver

How the Wordle solver works

Every time you finish a row in the grid above, the tool replays the same scoring logic Wordle itself uses: it checks each letter of your guess against a candidate word, marks exact matches green, marks letters that appear elsewhere in the word yellow, and marks everything else gray. Then it keeps only the candidates in the word list that would have produced the exact colors you entered, for every guess you have made so far.

That sounds simple, and for a guess with five different letters it is. The tricky part is repeated letters. If you guess a word with two E's and the target only has one, only one of those E's can be marked, and it depends on where the other E lands relative to the target's own letters. A lot of quick, hand-built Wordle helpers get this wrong: they treat each letter as an independent yes or no, which silently drops valid words or lets invalid ones through whenever a guess repeats a letter. This tool avoids that by scoring guesses the same two-pass way Wordle does, rather than approximating it.

How to use it

The grid mirrors the one in the actual game, so if you already have a Wordle in front of you, this should feel immediate.

1. Type your first guess into row one, one letter per box. The cursor moves forward automatically.
2. Click each tile to cycle its color to match what Wordle showed you: gray for a letter not in the word, yellow for the right letter in the wrong spot, green for correct.
3. The results below update instantly, no button to press.
4. Repeat for your next guess in row two, and so on, for up to six rows.
5. Tap any word in the results list to drop it straight into the next empty row, so you can keep testing follow-up guesses without retyping.

A worked example

Say your first guess was CRANE, and Wordle came back with C gray, R yellow, A gray, N green, E gray. That single guess already rules out a huge share of the word list: no word starting with C, no A anywhere, no E anywhere, N has to sit in fourth position, and R has to appear somewhere other than second position.

Enter exactly that into row one and the tool narrows a 14,855-word list down to 28 candidates, things like HORNS, ROUND, or RHINO. Add a second guess and the list usually shrinks to a handful of words, sometimes just one.

Why duplicate letters break other solvers

Take the guess SASSY against a target word that contains exactly one S, in the third position. Wordle's real scoring would mark one S green (the one that lines up) and the other S gray, never yellow, because there is no second S left over to account for. A solver that just checks “does the target contain this letter” for every position independently would wrongly allow words with only one S to survive, or wrongly reward a second S that Wordle never credited.

This tool sidesteps that by working through guesses letter by letter, in order, and marking a target's letters as used up as soon as they are matched, exactly like the real scoring pass. The practical effect: when your guesses include repeated letters, like the double O in MOODY or the double T in BUTTE, the filtered list you get back matches what the real game would show, not an approximation. If you want to see the exact underlying word list this runs against, the full word list page breaks down both the valid-guess list and the answer archive.

Strategy tips for faster solves

A few habits make a real difference in how many guesses a puzzle takes.

• Open with a word that uses five different, common letters. Vowel-heavy words like ADIEU or common-consonant words like CRANE both work well; see the starting words guide for a ranked list.
• Do not repeat a letter you already know is gray. It wastes a guess slot that could test a new letter instead.
• If your second guess still has three or more unknown letters, favor a word that tests new letters over one that tries to guess the answer outright.
• Yellow letters are information, not just a placement rule. A yellow in position 1 tells you that letter exists somewhere in positions 2 through 5, which narrows things more than it might feel like.
• Once the results list drops below about ten words, switch from information-gathering guesses to picking an actual candidate; testing new letters stops paying off once the list is that short.
• Watch for double letters in the remaining candidates. If every remaining word has a double letter in the same spot, that is close to a free green square.
• Six rows is the real game's limit, but this tool does not enforce it while you are practicing, so you can keep testing guesses past six if you are working through a puzzle after the fact.
• If the tool ever returns zero matches, recheck the colors on your earlier guesses before assuming the word list is missing something; a single misclicked tile is the most common cause.

Where the word lists come from

The solver checks candidates against two lists: a 14,855-word list of every guess Wordle accepts as valid, and a smaller 2,315-word archive of the actual words Wordle has used as answers. Answers are always drawn from the smaller, more common list, which is why the results panel flags candidates that are “likely answers” separately from the full set of valid guesses. See the word list page for exactly where both lists come from, how they were checked, and how to browse them directly.

Nothing you type into the grid above is sent anywhere. The word lists are loaded once as plain text files and every comparison happens in your browser's own JavaScript; there is no server-side lookup and no logging of your guesses. More detail on that is in the privacy policy.

Valid guesses vs. likely answers

Not every word this tool will accept as a guess is a word Wordle would ever pick as the day's answer. Wordle draws its answers from a curated, more common subset of English words; the valid-guess list is much broader on purpose, so that reasonable guesses like STARE or PROXY are never rejected just for being slightly less common than the answer pool. The table below shows the difference in scale.

When the results list is long, the “likely answer” badge is the fastest way to cut through the noise: if you have to guess blind, a flagged word is statistically the safer bet.

What yellow actually tells you

New players often read a yellow tile as “this letter is in the word, try it somewhere else next time,” and stop there. That is true, but it understates how much a yellow square actually rules out. A yellow at position 1 does not just mean “not position 1,” it also confirms the letter exists at least once in positions 2 through 5, which the solver applies as a hard constraint across every remaining guess, not just your next one.

The same logic runs the other way for gray. A gray letter does not always mean “never appears anywhere.” If a guess has two of the same letter and only one comes back colored, the gray one means “no additional copies beyond what is already confirmed,” not “zero copies.” This is exactly the duplicate-letter case covered above, and it is the single most common reason a hand-checked word list disagrees with what this tool returns: the tool applies that distinction consistently, every time, across all six rows at once.

Common mistakes when solving by hand

Most of the puzzles people get stuck on are not actually that hard, the mistake is usually bookkeeping rather than vocabulary.

• Forgetting a constraint from an earlier guess once a new one comes in. A letter that was yellow in guess one is still yellow in guess one; it does not stop mattering once guess two adds new information.
• Misreading a repeated-letter result, treating a single yellow-plus-gray pair on the same letter as if both were independent clues instead of one combined signal.
• Guessing a word that repeats a letter already confirmed gray, which burns a turn without adding new information.
• Sticking with an opening word out of habit even after several puzzles where it produced very little green early on.
• Second-guessing a green square. Once a letter is locked into position by a green tile, it stays locked; it never needs to be re-tested.

How fast the list narrows in practice

Rough numbers help set expectations. Before any guess, all 14,855 valid words are on the table. A well-chosen opening word with five distinct, common letters typically cuts that down to somewhere between a few hundred and a couple thousand candidates, depending on how many of its letters land yellow or green. A second guess, especially one that tests fresh letters against what is left, usually brings the list down to double digits. By the third guess most puzzles are down to a handful of candidates, and a fourth guess almost always isolates the answer outright.

That pace is not a guarantee, some answers share a lot of structure with dozens of other words (think of how many words end in -ATCH or -OUND), and those puzzles can stay stubborn for an extra guess even with good play. When that happens, the results list itself is the best guide: if a wide set of remaining candidates all share the same last three letters, your next guess should spend its remaining letters testing what comes before that shared ending, rather than repeating letters you already know are fixed.