Wordle Solver

How the solver decides what is still possible

Each coloured tile is a rule, applied all at once to a dictionary of five-letter words. Green fixes a letter to a position. Yellow says the letter is in the answer but not there. Grey removes it — with one important exception covered below. Together they are brutally effective: from 8,602 words, one informative guess usually leaves fewer than110 candidates, and a second cuts that to a handful.

The repeated-letter trap

This is where most solvers quietly get it wrong. If the answer holds one E and you play a word with two, the first comes back yellow or green and the second comes back grey. A naive solver reads that grey as "no E at all" and discards the correct word. What it actually means is "no more Es than this guess already accounts for" — so exactly one. This solver counts greens and yellows per letter within each guess and treats the grey as an exact total, not an exclusion.

How the suggestions are ranked

Likely answers are ordered by how typical their letters are for the words still in play, nudged towards words people recognise. If nine of ten remaining candidates have an R in third position, a word with that R is the safer bet.

Best next guesses measure information instead. For each guess the solver groups the remaining candidates by the colour pattern that guess would produce. A guess scattering them into many small groups tells you a great deal; one leaving a single large group tells you almost nothing. The figure shown is the average group size, and smaller is better. This is why the best next guess is sometimes a word that cannot be the answer: testing five untried letters often beats guessing between two candidates at random.

Best opening words

The opening guess faces the same list every time, so the best openers are worked out once rather than recalculated. Measured across our full set of common five-letter words:

• TARES — narrows the field to about 111 words on average
• RATES — narrows the field to about 113 words on average
• TALES — narrows the field to about 114 words on average
• TEARS — narrows the field to about 126 words on average
• TIRES — narrows the field to about 131 words on average

TARES edges out RATES for the reason the whole list looks alike: these combine the most frequent vowels and consonants in the positions they most often occupy. The gap between the top few is small, so pick whichever you remember most easily. One caveat worth stating plainly — this comes from our own open word list, not from any official answer list, and we make no claim that it matches one.

Playing on hard mode

Hard mode forces every revealed clue into your next guess, removing the option of a pure information-gathering word. Two adjustments help: use the Likely answers list rather than Best next guesses, since every guess must now be a live candidate; and when candidates differ by one letter — batch, catch, match,patch — test the likeliest distinguishing letter first. Your opening guess matters more here, not less: it is the only turn with no constraints at all.