Five Letter Solver

What This Tool Does

Enter what you already know about a 5-letter word puzzle (which letters are right, which are close, and which are wrong), and this tool searches its dictionary for every word that could possibly fit.

The Three Colors

Gray: the letter isn't in the word at all.
Yellow: the letter is in the word, but in a different spot.
Green: the letter is correct and in the right spot.

Handling Repeated Letters

If your guess has a letter twice and only one comes back colored, the solver knows the answer contains that letter exactly once, not zero times and not twice. Most simple solvers get this wrong.

Too Many Results?

Add more letters and set more colors to narrow the list. The more tiles you fill in, the fewer and the more accurate the matches.

Enter Every Constraint, Not Just the Obvious One

The single biggest efficiency gain is entering the greys. Players faithfully record their greens and yellows and then skip the letters that came back blank, which is exactly backwards: an eliminated letter is often worth more than a confirmed one.

Concretely, a first guess that comes back entirely grey has removed five letters from consideration, and against a list of 8,636 words that typically cuts the field by more than half. Feed all five in. The list you get back is the honest one.

If the solver returns nothing, one of your constraints is stricter than you meant. The usual culprit is a letter marked absent that actually appears elsewhere in the word, which happens whenever your guess used a letter twice.

The Repeated-Letter Rule Most Tools Get Wrong

Say the answer is SPEED and you guess ERASE. The first E comes back yellow and the second E comes back grey. That grey does not mean "no E in the word." It means "no more Es beyond the ones already marked."

Simple filters treat that second grey as a blanket exclusion and quietly drop the correct answer from your results. This solver counts occurrences rather than treating each letter as present or absent, so a letter marked once yellow and once grey is read as exactly one of that letter.

It matters more often than you would think. Roughly a third of five-letter words contain a repeated letter, so the situation comes up in a large share of games.

What to Do With a Long Result List

Getting forty candidates back is not a failure, but picking one of them at random is. When the list is long, spend your next guess on information rather than on a lottery ticket.

Look at what actually varies across the candidates. If they are all of the shape consonant-consonant-A-consonant-E and the only thing that changes is the first two letters, guess a word that tests several of those first letters at once, even if that word could not possibly be the answer. One guess that splits the field beats five guesses that each eliminate one word.

Once you are down to about five or fewer candidates, switch strategies and guess one of them, because at that point the chance of simply being right outweighs the information a probe would give you.

The Positions Are Not Symmetric

When you have to bet, bet with the distribution. Across the 8,636 words on this site, a vowel sits in position two more often than in any other slot. Position four is dominated by E, which appears there in 1,705 words, more than double the next letter. Position five is led by S, then E, then Y.

Position three is the flattest of the five, which makes it the least informative place to have a confirmed letter and the best place to test one when you have a free choice.

One caveat on the S. Almost a third of all five-letter words end in S because English pluralises so freely, but curated daily puzzles strip most plurals out of their answer lists. Treat a trailing S as less likely than the raw frequency suggests.

Hard Mode Is a Different Game

In hard mode every confirmed letter must appear in every later guess, which removes the information-only probe from your options entirely. That changes what a good position looks like.

Yellows become expensive, because a yellow locks a letter into all your remaining guesses without telling you where it belongs. And you become vulnerable to word families: four greens with a single unknown letter, as in the BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH group, can eat every guess you have left one letter at a time.

If you are not in hard mode and you see that shape forming, break it immediately with a word containing several of the candidate letters at once. It costs one guess and saves three.

Everything Runs in Your Browser

There is no server doing the filtering. The word list loads as a static file and the search runs on your own device, so nothing you type is sent anywhere, logged, or associated with you.

That is also why results are instant: no round trip per search. And nothing downloads until you start typing, so arriving, reading, and leaving costs you no data at all.

A note on dictionaries. This site filters a standard 8,636-word list of valid five-letter words. Daily puzzles usually accept a similar list of guesses but draw answers from a much smaller curated set, so a word here can be a legal guess without ever being a possible answer. When several candidates fit, prefer the ordinary one.