Wordle Solver

Every tile you mark is a small fact about the hidden word, and the solver turns each one into a filter. A check (green) tile locks a letter to its square: the answer has that exact letter in that exact spot. A dot (amber) tile says the letter appears somewhere in the answer — but not in the square where you guessed it. A slash (gray) tile is the subtle one, and it is where most quick solvers quietly get things wrong.

The correct reading of gray involves counting copies. Within a single guess, tally how many tiles of a given letter came back colored — check or dot. The answer contains at least that many copies of the letter. If one or more further copies of the same letter came back gray, the answer contains exactly that many copies, no more. And every gray tile still rules its letter out of that particular square, which matters whenever another copy of the same letter scored.

A worked example. You guess SPEED and the puzzle returns S, P and D gray, the first E as a dot and the second E gray. A naive reading — “E is in the word, E is not in the word” — is a contradiction. The counting rule resolves it: one E colored plus one E gray means the answer holds exactly one E, and that E sits neither in position three (the dot square) nor position four (the gray square). ERASE is out immediately — it has two Es. ELDER fails twice over: two Es and a D. CANOE fits perfectly: a single E, in a square your guess never tested. Run that one guess against the full list and 8,636 words collapse to 698 — a 92 percent cut from five tiles.

Solvers that treat gray as a blanket “letter not in the word” would throw away every word containing an E in that example — including the answer. If a tool has ever insisted that nothing fits when you knew the puzzle was solvable, a mishandled duplicate was probably the reason.

With the impossible words removed, the solver scores every surviving candidate by positional letter frequency: how often each of its letters appears in that exact position across the words still in play. The tallies are recomputed after every guess, so the ranking reflects your actual field rather than generic English statistics. Across the full list, S opens 1,056 of the 8,636 words, A is the second letter of 1,479, E is the fourth letter of 1,705, and S closes 2,695 — the list keeps plurals, so the final position is S-heavy.

Why prefer five different letters? Because a repeated letter mostly re-tests something you have already probed. 2,971 of the 8,636 words — roughly a third — contain at least one repeated letter, but while the field is wide a word like CARES examines five separate letters where GEESE examines three. The solver applies this preference only while more than 20 candidates remain; ties resolve alphabetically.

That threshold marks the switch from probing to winning. Early on, the best guess is rarely the answer — it is the word that splits the remaining field hardest. Once the field is small, guess to win: every candidate is a plausible answer, and each guess doubles as a probe anyway. The one exception is the classic ending trap — a family like BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH and PATCH that differs by a single letter. Checking those one at a time can burn four guesses; a deliberate probe such as CLIMB tests C, L, M and B in a single move and usually settles the family outright.

There is nothing Wordle-specific in any of this. The solver works for any daily that deals in five-letter guesses and answers with correct, present and absent tiles — which is precisely how Quintle, our own daily five-letter game, scores its board. If you would rather sharpen the unaided game than shortcut it, the Quintle strategy guide covers openers, second guesses and hard-mode discipline in depth.

Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company; duplixo is not affiliated with the Times, and the name appears here purely to describe the style of puzzle the tool supports. The mathematics is the same wherever the tiles come from.

If you want to browse rather than solve, the complete 5-letter word list has its own pattern finder — filter by starting letters, endings and locked positions. And for the theory of the first move across every daily word game, see our guide to the best opening words.

The word list is ENABLE — a public-domain word-game list — filtered to its 8,636 five-letter entries, exactly the same data that powers our five-letter word pages. Public domain means no licensing questions and no mystery about what is in it. It skews generous: plurals, inflections and plenty of obscure-but-valid words sit alongside the everyday ones, which is what you want when the job is to avoid eliminating the real answer.

One honest caveat: every daily game curates its own answer list, and none publish it as gospel. Occasionally an answer sits outside any public list, and most games accept guesses from a far larger dictionary than they draw answers from. If your tiles are marked exactly as the game showed them and the solver still comes up empty, the answer may simply be a word the public lists do not carry. It is rare — but it happens, and pretending otherwise would be selling you something.