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What's still possible

Add your guesses with the colours the game gave you. Every row narrows the list, and the information from your first guess still counts after your fourth.

How this works

This is not the game itself. It helps you with a word game you are already playing somewhere else \u2014 Wordle, or any game where you guess a hidden five-letter word and each letter comes back coloured.

What the colours mean

A

Green \u2014 Right letter, right place.

R

Yellow \u2014 Right letter, wrong place — it is in the word, somewhere else.

N

Grey \u2014 Not in the word — or not again, if it already showed green or yellow.

Then

  1. Type the five-letter word you just guessed in your game.
  2. Click each letter until its colour matches what your game showed.
  3. Add it. Every word that could still be the answer appears below.

Add each new guess as you make it \u2014 the list gets shorter every time. Not played before? Press “see an example” under the box and watch it work.

The words that could still be your answer appear here after you add a guess. Every guess you add makes the list shorter.

Grey does not mean the letter is absent

This is where most helpers go wrong, and it costs you the answer rather than a guess.

Say the word is STEAL and you guess SPEED. The S comes back green, the first E comes back green, and the second E comes back grey — because STEAL has only one E, and you have already been shown it.

A helper that reads that grey as “no E in this word” removes every word containing an E, including STEAL. You then spend two guesses being told nothing, because the answer was ruled out on turn one.

Grey means no more of this letter than the greens and yellows already show. On that SPEED example this tool returns 25 words, STEAL among them, and nothing with two E's — which is the correct answer to a question most tools answer wrongly.

When to guess a word that cannot be right

Counter-intuitive and worth knowing. If you are down to eight candidates that differ only in their first letter — _ATCH: batch, catch, hatch, latch, match, patch, watch — guessing one of them tests exactly one letter and you can burn four turns losing.

Guessing a word that tests several of those letters at once, even though it cannot possibly be the answer, eliminates most of the field in one turn. It feels like a wasted guess and it is usually the correct one.

Only do it when you have turns to spare. On your last guess, take the likeliest candidate.

This does not know today's answer

And it is not going to. The game draws from a curated list far smaller than the dictionary, and some sites have obtained it — which turns a helper into a spoiler, and makes the puzzle pointless rather than easier.

So this filters all 4,389 five-letter words in a standard English dictionary. You will see valid words the game would never choose. That is the trade, and we would rather be on this side of it.

For letters with no positions attached, the word unscrambler runs on the same dictionary. For constraints without colours — five-letter words starting with S and ending in A — the word finder is faster.

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