Wordle Solver

How to Use the Wordle Solver

1. Choose your word length — select 4, 5, 6, or 7 letters at the top of the tool. The default is 5 letters, matching the standard daily Wordle game.
2. Type your guess — use your physical keyboard or the on-screen QWERTY keyboard. Backspace or DEL deletes the last letter; Enter commits the row.
3. Click each tile to set its color — each click cycles: Gray → Yellow → Green. Match the exact feedback your game gave you. Suggestions update live as you change tile colors, before you even press Enter.
4. Read the suggestions — the Best Answers tab lists every word still possible; the Best Info tab ranks words by how much information they reveal about the remaining candidates.
5. Add more rows — press Enter to lock in a guess, then type your next one. Repeat until the word is solved.

The solver also shows a Letter Status panel tracking which letters are confirmed, present (wrong spot), excluded, or unknown — so you can see the full picture at a glance without scrolling back through guesses.

What Does a Wordle Solver Do?

A Wordle solver processes the color-coded feedback from your guesses and eliminates every impossible word from the candidate pool. It applies three core rules simultaneously:

• Green locks a letter to its exact position — any candidate without that letter at that spot is removed.
• Yellow means present but misplaced — the answer must contain the letter, but not at that position. Candidates that violate either condition are filtered out.
• Gray means absent — unless the same letter appeared as green or yellow in the same guess (duplicate-letter case), it is fully excluded from the answer.

Beyond filtering, this solver ranks the remaining words by information value — not just alphabetically or randomly — so each suggestion actively moves you closer to the answer.

What Gray, Yellow, and Green Mean

• Gray — not in the word. The letter does not appear in the answer at all. Exception: if the same letter also appears as yellow or green in the same guess, the gray copy means "no additional copies beyond those already accounted for."
• Yellow — in the word, wrong position. The letter exists in the answer, but not at this specific position. Your next guess should use this letter somewhere else.
• Green — correct letter, correct position. This letter is at exactly the right spot. Every valid answer must have this letter here.

Supports 4, 5, 6, and 7 Letter Word Games

Not all Wordle-style games use five letters. This solver works with any grid width from 4 to 7:

• 4 letters — compact puzzles with a smaller candidate pool, often solvable in 3 guesses.
• 5 letters — the standard Wordle format used by the NYT and most variants.
• 6 letters — used by games such as Wordle 6 and custom variants, with a larger word space.
• 7 letters — longer puzzles that require more strategic guessing to narrow down the larger candidate pool efficiently.

Select the length before you start. Changing length mid-game resets the board and loads the matching word list for that length.

How the Ranking System Works

Not all remaining words are equally useful as a next guess. This solver scores every candidate using a weighted combination of five signals:

• Overall letter frequency — letters that appear in a large fraction of remaining candidates score higher. Guessing them reveals more information regardless of position.
• Positional letter frequency — how often each letter appears at its specific position across remaining candidates. A letter common in position 3 is more valuable at position 3.
• Unique letter bonus — words where every letter is different cover more ground per guess. Repeated letters waste an opportunity to test a new letter.
• Vowel coverage — early guesses benefit from testing multiple vowels since most English words require at least two.
• Duplicate penalty — a small deduction for repeated letters, which provide less information than five distinct letters.

The result is a 0–100 score shown next to each suggestion. Words scoring near 100 are the strongest next moves given your current clues.

Best Answers vs Best Info Guesses — and Hard Mode

The Suggestions panel has two tabs that serve different purposes:

• Best Answers shows only words that are still valid solutions given all your clues. Every word in this list could be the actual answer. Use this tab when the candidate pool is small and you want to guess the answer directly.
• Best Info may include words that are not themselves valid answers, but are strategically chosen to reveal as much information as possible about the remaining candidates. These are high-information probes — useful when many candidates remain and you want to narrow the field quickly.

When to use each: with 100+ remaining candidates, Best Info guesses eliminate more words per turn. Once the pool shrinks below ~10, switch to Best Answers to guess the solution directly.

Hard Mode — toggle this to restrict both tabs to words that obey all confirmed feedback. In Hard Mode, any suggestion already satisfies every known green and yellow constraint, which is required by some game variants and is useful practice for real Wordle play.

Best Wordle Starting Words (Ranked by Strategy)

The starting word you choose sets the trajectory for the entire puzzle. A strong opener should include common vowels, high-frequency consonants, and no repeated letters. Here are the top-performing openers by category:

Top Tier (Best All-Around Openers)

These balance vowel coverage with the most common consonants in 5-letter English words:

• CRANE — C, R, A, N, E: covers two top vowels and three high-frequency consonants
• SLATE — S, L, A, T, E: strong consonant coverage with A and E
• TRACE — T, R, A, C, E: same high-value letters in different positions
• STARE — S, T, A, R, E: top 5 consonants S, T, R plus A and E
• ARISE — A, R, I, S, E: three vowels with R and S
• IRATE — I, R, A, T, E: three vowels with R and T
• ROAST — R, O, A, S, T: two vowels with the consonant cluster R, S, T

Why they work: the most common letters in English 5-letter words are E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N. These words collectively cover most of them with no repeated letters.

Vowel-Heavy Openers

If you want to identify vowels early, these words test three or four at once:

• ADIEU — four vowels (A, I, E, U)
• AUDIO — A, U, D, I, O: four vowels and only one consonant
• OUIJA — O, U, I, J, A: maximum vowel density

Trade-off: fewer common consonants tested. Best used as a second guess after a consonant-heavy first guess reveals some structure.

Balanced Information Starters

These cover a wider spread of common letter positions:

• CRATE — strong positional coverage for C, R, A, T, E
• SLANT — S, L, A, N, T without a second vowel, tests consonant-heavy words
• LEAST — L, E, A, S, T: two vowels in the middle cluster
• STONE — S, T, O, N, E: three different high-frequency consonants
• PLANE — covers P, L, A, N, E for positional variety

What Makes a Good Wordle Starting Word?

1. Contains Common Letters

The most frequent letters in 5-letter English words are E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N. A starting word that hits four or five of these letters immediately eliminates a large portion of candidates regardless of position.

2. No Repeated Letters

A repeated letter in your opening guess wastes a slot. For example, LEVEL repeats both E and L — you only learn about three distinct letters instead of five. In contrast, CRANE tests five completely different letters, maximizing information per guess.

3. Covers Different Positions

Letters that appear across many different positions in the candidate pool provide better positional feedback. Words like CRANE and SLATE are specifically good because their letters tend to appear in varied positions, giving yellow feedback that is still highly informative.

4. Includes at Least Two Vowels

Most 5-letter words contain two to three vowels. Testing at least two vowels early confirms or eliminates the primary vowel structure, which dramatically cuts the remaining candidate pool.

Should You Use the Same Starting Word Every Time?

There are two proven approaches:

Both strategies win. Use the Starting Word Tester above to score any word you are considering — it shows unique letter count, vowel count, common-letter coverage, and an overall starting score out of 100.

Does the First Word Matter That Much?

Yes — significantly. A well-chosen opening guess can reduce remaining possibilities from thousands to under 200 in a single move. An optimized two-guess sequence often leaves fewer than 50 candidates:

• Before guessing~2,300 words
• After 1 guess<200 words
• After 2 guesses<50 words
• After 3 guesses<15 words
• After 4 guesses<5 words

A weak opener — one with repeated letters or uncommon letters — leaves more than 1,000 candidates after the first guess, giving you far fewer turns to finish inside the 6-guess limit.

Best Starting Words for 4, 6, and 7 Letter Games

The same principles apply across all lengths: common letters, no repeats, vowel coverage. Here are strong openers by length:

Best Wordle Strategy

1. Open with a strong starter. Choose a word that covers E, A, R, T, S or similar high-frequency letters with no repeated letters. CRANE, SLATE, and STARE all score near 100/100 in the Starting Word Tester above.
2. Use the Best Info tab when many candidates remain. If 100+ words are still possible after your first guess, the Best Info suggestion will eliminate the most candidates with a single guess — even if that word is not itself a possible answer.
3. Move yellow letters to new positions. Yellow means the letter is in the word but at a different position. Your next guess must place it elsewhere — do not leave it in the same column.
4. Avoid repeating letters until necessary. Every new unique letter you test eliminates more candidates. Repeating a confirmed letter in an unconfirmed slot wastes information in early guesses.
5. Watch the duplicate-letter note. When the solver shows "Only exactly one X is possible," adjust your guesses accordingly — do not include two copies of that letter.
6. Switch to Best Answers near the end. Once the remaining pool is small (under 10), switch to the Best Answers tab and guess directly from the list. At this stage, every valid answer is equally likely, so the highest-ranked answer candidate is your best move.
7. Use Hard Mode to sharpen your skills. Hard Mode requires every guess to respect all known clues, simulating real competitive Wordle constraints. It trains you to avoid "throwaway" information guesses.

Why Duplicate Letters Are Tricky

Duplicate letters are the most common source of solver errors — and of manual mistakes. Consider this example:

You guess SHEEP. The game returns: S=gray, H=gray, E₁=yellow, E₂=gray, P=gray. What does this mean?

• E₁ is yellow: the answer contains at least one E, and it is not at position 3.
• E₂ is gray: there are no additional E's beyond what is already accounted for. Since E₁ confirmed one E, E₂ being gray means the answer contains exactly one E.

A basic solver that treats the gray E₂ as "E is excluded completely" would wrongly filter out all words containing E — including the correct answer. This solver tracks a minimum and maximum count for every letter, so it correctly handles this case:

• min[E] = 1 (from yellow E₁)
• max[E] = 1 (from gray E₂, capped at green+yellow count in that guess)
• Result: the answer must have exactly 1 E — at some position other than position 3.

This cross-guess duplicate logic also works when the same letter turns green in one guess and gray in a later guess, correctly maintaining the minimum count established by the green tile.

Wordle Solver vs Word Finder

These two tools look similar but serve different goals:

If you need to unscramble letters rather than solve a Wordle puzzle, try our Word Unscrambler instead. For general word analysis and character counts, see the Word Counter. Browse all free writing tools at the Tools directory.

Can This Solve Today's Wordle?

This tool does not fetch or store daily Wordle answers. It has no connection to the NYT Wordle answer list. Instead, you supply the feedback from your own game and the solver filters what the answer could be based on what you tell it.

This design is intentional: you remain in control of the game, and the solver acts as a strategic advisor rather than a cheat sheet. You still make every guess yourself.

Complete Privacy

Everything runs entirely in your browser. The word lists are downloaded once when the page loads; after that, no network requests are made for solving. Your guesses are never sent to any server, never stored in a database, and never logged. The shareable URL hash is generated and decoded entirely client-side — only the URL itself is shared, nothing else.

Frequently Asked Questions