Put in what the board has already told you and this shows every five-letter word still standing, with
the words you are actually likely to be looking for first. It handles the repeated-letter case
properly, which is where most solvers quietly go wrong.
8,636
Five-letter words in the list, 3,088 of them common enough to be a real answer
47%
Share of common five-letter words containing an E, the most frequent letter
1%
Share containing a Q or a Z. Testing those early is close to a wasted guess
How to fill it in
Three rows, and the middle one matters most
In place (green)
Type each confirmed letter into the box matching its position and leave the rest blank. If you know
the word ends in E, put E in the fifth box only.
Wrong place (yellow)
Letters you know are in the word but not where. Type them together, no spacing needed. The solver
keeps only words that contain every one of them.
Not in word (grey)
Everything the board has ruled out. Add letters here as you learn them and the list shrinks fast.
A grey letter that is also green somewhere is handled correctly.
The one thing worth knowing about yellows
A yellow tells you two things: the letter is in the word, and it is not in that position. This solver
uses the first fact. It does not track which position each yellow came from, so it will occasionally
leave a word in the list that your board has already excluded. Scanning past one or two extra
candidates is a fair trade for a form you can fill in five seconds, but it is worth knowing rather
than being surprised by.
The data behind the advice
Which letters actually turn up
Every opener recommendation you have read is ultimately this chart. Cover the tall bars on the left and
you learn a lot on turn one; test a Q or a Z and you have spent a guess on a one percent chance.
A good opening guess is simply one that covers as much of the left half of this chart as possible. That is the whole theory behind the usual suggestions.
S is the surprise
At 44% it is the second most common letter, ahead of A. Plenty of that is plurals and verb endings,
which is exactly why an opener containing S earns its place. RAISE and AROSE both use one.
Vowels are not automatically valuable
U appears in only 17% of common answers, less often than D or C. An opener stuffed with vowels, like
AUDIO, spends two of its five letters on relatively weak tests. That is why it sits below RAISE
despite feeling more thorough.
Playing better
How to use a solver without ruining the game
There is not much satisfaction in typing your clues into a box and copying the answer out, and most
people who do it once do not do it again. The interesting uses are narrower than that.
Use it when you are stuck at four letters
The genuinely frustrating Wordle position is knowing four letters and their positions with several
candidates left, because at that point it is a coin flip and skill has stopped mattering. Checking how
many candidates actually remain tells you whether to spend a turn gathering information or just guess.
Use it afterwards to check your reasoning
Finish the puzzle, then put your third-guess clues in and see how many words were still possible. You
will sometimes find you had it down to one and guessed something else, which is the kind of mistake
worth noticing.
Learn the frequency chart instead
Twenty minutes with the chart above will improve your average more than a solver ever will. Knowing
that S is nearly as common as A, that U is weaker than it feels, and that only about one answer in a
hundred contains a Z, changes how you open and how you rescue a bad start.
Remember the answer list is curated
Wordle picks from a hand-chosen set of ordinary words. If the solver leaves you with ELINT and PLANT,
it is PLANT. This is why results are sorted with common words first rather than alphabetically.
By coverage, RAISE and ARISE are the strongest openers in our list. Each one touches 94.1% of common
five-letter words, meaning that in nineteen games out of twenty at least one of those five letters is in
the answer. AROSE and NOISE follow at 93.8%.
The popular suggestions hold up reasonably well. SLATE reaches 92.3%, STARE and TEARS 92.1%, AUDIO
91.3%. CRANE is the weakest of the famous ones at 87.7%, because C and N are less common than people
assume.
The honest caveat: coverage is not the same as information. A guess that splits the remaining
possibilities evenly is technically better than one that merely touches many words, and the two do not
always agree.
Why does a grey letter sometimes appear in the answer?
This is the rule that confuses everyone, and it only shows up with repeated letters. If the answer is
SPEED and you guess ERASE, the first E comes back green or yellow and the second E comes back grey,
because the answer has fewer Es than your guess did.
The solver handles it the way the game does: a letter is only treated as banned if it is not already
accounted for as a green or a yellow. So marking a letter grey will never eliminate a word that needs
that letter elsewhere.
How many five-letter words are there?
8,636 in our full list, of which 3,088 are common enough that you would recognise them. Wordle itself
draws answers from a much smaller curated set, a couple of thousand words, while accepting a wider list
as valid guesses.
That is why the solver sorts common words to the top. A real answer is almost never obscure.
Should I guess a word that cannot be the answer?
Sometimes, and this is the single most useful piece of Wordle strategy. If you are down to four
candidates that differ only in one position, for instance BATCH, CATCH, MATCH and PATCH, guessing any of
them gives you a one in four chance and no information about the rest.
Guessing something like CHOMP instead tests C, M and P in one go and usually leaves you with a certain
answer on the next turn. You give up a chance of winning in three to guarantee winning in four.
Is this the same as playing on hard mode?
No. Hard mode forces you to reuse every green and yellow you have found, which rules out the
information-gathering guess described above. The solver does not enforce that, so if you are playing hard
mode you need to pick from the results yourself with your existing clues in mind.
Does it work for other five-letter guessing games?
Yes. Quordle, Octordle, Dordle and the various regional clones all use the same green, yellow and grey
feedback on five-letter words, so the filtering is identical. Run each board separately.