Wordle solver

Every guess gives three kinds of clue. Green tiles fix a letter in its square. Yellow tiles say the letter is in the answer but somewhere else, so the square it sat in is ruled out for that letter. Grey tiles say the answer holds no more copies of that letter than the green and yellow tiles already account for. The helper reads all three from each row you add and tests every word of the chosen length against them. A word survives only when it has each green letter in place and every yellow letter somewhere else. It must also use no letter more often than the grey tiles allow. Add a second or third guess and the rules stack, so a list of thousands usually falls to a few dozen possible answers after two rows.

The colours are entered by tapping, because typing a whole pattern is where mistakes creep in. Each tap moves a tile from grey to yellow to green and back. The tiles carry a tick or a dot as well as a colour, so the board reads the same for colour-blind players and in high contrast mode.

Repeated letters are where most hand-made guesses go wrong. Say a guess holds a letter twice, and one copy turns green or yellow while the other stays grey. The game is telling you the answer has exactly one of that letter. It does not mean the letter is missing. The helper applies that rule: a grey tile caps the count at the number of coloured copies in the same row.

Take SASSY against the answer ESSAY. The third S is green, the first S turns yellow, and the fourth S is grey, because the answer has only two. From that one row the list keeps ESSAY and ASSAY, and drops every word with three S or none. Two yellow copies of the same letter work the same way: the answer holds at least two, in other squares.

Once guesses are on the board, the helper suggests a few next guesses from the words that remain. The suggestion is a rule of thumb, not a proof of the best move. It favours words whose untried letters appear in about half of the remaining candidates. A letter that every candidate shares, or that almost none has, tells you little either way. Letters that often sit in the same square across the remaining words earn a smaller bonus.

• Early on, testing common consonants such as R, S, T, L and N usually removes more words than finding a second vowel.
• With few candidates left, guessing one of them outright is often faster than a pure elimination word.
• In hard mode every revealed hint must be reused, so the suggestions only help if they keep your green and yellow letters, which candidates always do.

No opening word wins every time, but popular starting words share a pattern: five different letters, two or three vowels and consonants that many answers contain. CRANE, SLATE, STARE, ARISE and TRACE all test R and T or S alongside common vowels. ADIEU tests four vowels at once, which clears up vowels quickly but tells you little about consonants, so it usually needs a consonant-heavy second guess.

A second word that shares no letter with the first covers ten letters in two rows. After SLATE, a word such as CORNY or ROUND tests five new letters. The suggestions follow the same idea automatically once your first row is entered.

The 5 letter word finder behind the helper holds 12,653 five-letter words. It works just as well without any guesses: set a starting letter, an ending, or letters that must appear, and it lists every match. The same page covers four-letter games and the six- and seven-letter variants of Wordle Unlimited, Quordle-style boards with several answers at once, and longer puzzles. Choose the length first, because changing it clears the board.

The words come from an open word list built for word games, which combines British and American spellings (Letterpress word list). COLOUR and COLOR both appear, as do plurals and verb forms. That is deliberate: Wordle accepts many more words as guesses than it uses as answers, and its answers come from a shorter, hand-picked list of everyday words. Common words are listed first, so the likely answers rise to the top of the results.

Each result shows its Scrabble score, the sum of its tile values in the English edition (Hasbro rules). Q and Z are worth 10 points, J and X 8, and K 5, while vowels and common consonants score 1. Sorting by score helps when the same word feeds a board game. When you need every word a rack of tiles can make, blanks included, the word unscrambler does that.

Wordle is a daily puzzle, published by the New York Times since it bought the game from its creator, Josh Wardle. Everyone gets the same word each day, with six guesses to find it. Whether looking at a list spoils that is your call. Many players use the helper only after a game, to see which words they could have played, or only on the sixth guess to protect a streak. This site is not affiliated with the New York Times.

Everything runs in your browser: the word list downloads once and the filtering happens on your device, so no guess you enter is sent anywhere. If you like the daily ritual itself, the daily word scramble is a ten-word timed puzzle that is the same for every player each day.