Wordle Solver

The Wordle Solver is a free helper for Wordle-style five-letter word puzzles. Type in each guess you played, tap the tiles until they show the same gray, yellow and green as your game, and the solver shows how many words still fit, lists them, and ranks the best next guesses. Everything runs in your browser.

This is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by The New York Times, and it does not show or copy any game’s daily answer.

How to use the solver

1. Enter your guess. Type the five letters on your keyboard or the on-screen keys. Or tap a suggested word to fill the row.
2. Set the colors. Each tile starts gray. Tap a tile once for yellow and twice for green; a third tap goes back to gray. You can also type the colors as B, Y and G (for example BYBGB) in the small box.
3. Press Enter. The row is added, the count at the top of the panel updates, and the keyboard shades known letters.
4. Pick your next guess. The Best tab ranks guesses for the words that are left. Play one, enter its colors here and repeat.

Tap any earlier tile to fix its color, or use Undo. Reset clears the board for a new puzzle. When a row comes back all green, the puzzle is marked solved and saved to the History tab.

How the best guess is chosen

For every word it could suggest, the solver works out the color pattern that word would produce against each word that is still possible. A good guess splits the remaining words into many small groups. The solver measures this as expected information in bits (the entropy of the split); each extra bit roughly halves the list. Each suggestion also shows about how many words you can expect to have left.

Suggestions marked can win could be the answer themselves. Ones marked probe cannot, but may test more new letters. With only a few words left, the solver favors words that can win.

The first-guess rankings are worked out in advance, so they appear instantly. Later rankings are computed in small slices, so the page never freezes. In our own test, the solver followed its top suggestion for every one of the 3,122 words in its answer list and solved them all within six guesses, averaging about 3.5.

Hard mode and rare words

• Hard mode limits suggestions to words that still fit every clue, which also keeps you within hard-mode rules. Without it, the solver may suggest a probe word that cannot be the answer but narrows the list faster.
• Rare words widens the candidates from about 3,100 everyday words to the full list of about 14,300 accepted five-letter words. Leave it off unless the list runs out. If no common word fits your colors, the solver switches to rare words on its own and tells you.

How repeated letters are handled

This solver scores guesses the same way the game does. First it marks every letter in the right spot green. Then, going left to right, it marks a letter yellow only while the answer still has an unmatched copy of it; any extra copies are gray. So if you guess SPEED and the answer is ABIDE, the first E is yellow and the second is gray, because ABIDE has only one E. The solver keeps a word only if it would give exactly the colors you entered for every guess, so a gray second E correctly rules out words with two E’s.

Tips

• Start strong. Among common words, RAISE, CARTE, IRATE, SLATE and STARE top the solver’s first-guess ranking against its answer list.
• Check the Letters tab. It shows what share of the remaining words contain each letter, plus the most common letter in each position.
• Enter colors carefully. If the solver says no word fits, a tile is usually set to the wrong color. Tap it to fix it.

FAQ

Does it know today’s answer?

No. It only uses the guesses and colors you enter, and it has no access to any game’s daily answer.

Where do the words come from?

The words are the same lists our 5 Letter Word Finder and Quad Word use, with slurs and offensive words removed. The answer list is about 3,100 everyday words, and the full list adds uncommon words that are accepted as guesses.

Is my history saved?

Solved puzzles, your current board and your settings are saved in this browser only. You can clear the history from the History tab.

Want to play instead of solve? Try our free Wordle game or take on four boards at once in Quad Word.