Five-Letter Word Finder

Your board knows more than you do

Four rows of green, yellow and grey contain a startling amount of information, and almost nobody extracts all of it — because doing so means holding a dozen overlapping rules in your head at once while also, somehow, thinking of words. This does the bookkeeping. You supply the board; it supplies what's left.

• 856 everyday five-letter words the search starts from
• 22 left after one good guess, on average — measured over every possible answer
• 3.2 left after two. The third guess is usually the last one

Using it

The board is the input. Type your first guess into the top row, then click each tile to cycle its colour — grey for a letter that isn't in the word, yellow for one in the wrong place, green for one that's right. A new row appears as you finish each guess, and the list below updates on every click. If you'd rather keep your hands on the keyboard, the space bar cycles the tile under the cursor and the arrow keys move around.

The repeated-letter trap

Here is the case that breaks the three-boxes approach, and it comes up far more often than people expect.

• What the board shows

  You guess SPEED and the answer is SPEND. First three tiles green, the fourth E grey, the D green.

  The grey E doesn't mean “no E in the word”. It means “no second E” — the word's only E is already accounted for.

• What a naive filter does

  It files E under “letters not in the word”, then throws away every candidate containing an E — including SPEND, the actual answer.

  Which is why a finder sometimes tells you nothing fits when something obviously does.

How much a guess is really worth

The tool doesn't just filter — it ranks what to guess next, and the arithmetic is worth understanding because it changes how you play. Every candidate answer would return some pattern of colours for a given guess, and candidates that would return the same pattern stay indistinguishable. So the value of a guess is simply how finely it splits the field. Lower is better; a guess that separates everything scores 1.

• Before you start 856
• Guess 1 22
• Guess 2 3.2
• Guess 3 1.3

The first guess does nearly all the work — 856 down to about 22. The second takes you to 3.2, which is why the third guess so often wins: by then there is usually only one word left that fits, and this page will simply tell you what it is.

Openers, ranked by narrowing rather than colour

The word guess page scores opening words by how many squares they light up. That's the fun measure. This is the useful one: how many candidates each leaves behind.

• STARE 21.7
• CRANE 22.5
• SLATE 23.6
• ADIEU 49.2

STARE edges it, and the spread between the sensible openers is small — 21.7 against 23.6. The vowel-stuffed ADIEU is the outlier at 49.2: vowels feel informative, but consonants are what separate words.

The guess that can't win

Tick suggest guesses that can't win and the ranking widens to the full 8,713-word guess list rather than only the words still possible. Sometimes a word that is definitely not the answer separates the candidates better than any of them can — the classic case being four words that differ by one letter, where one throwaway guess tests all four at once.

1. With plenty of guesses left, take the information. If five candidates remain and you have three rows to spare, the sacrifice guess is usually right — it turns a one-in-five gamble into a certainty.
2. On your last guess, never sacrifice. A word that can't win is worth nothing when there's no row after it. Take the most likely candidate instead.
3. Ties go to the word that could be the answer. That's how the ranking here breaks them: between two guesses that narrow equally, one might just end the game.

About the word list

The candidates come from the 856 hand-curated everyday words our own guessing game draws its secrets from — words a person would use, with no obscurities dredged up to look clever. Every popular guessing game keeps its own list, so if you're playing someone else's puzzle, treat the results as a shortlist rather than gospel: the shape of the deduction is identical, but their answer might be a word we'd never deal.

The colours are scored by the same engine as the game itself — so if the finder and the game ever disagreed, that would be a bug in both.

Playing rather than solving

If you'd rather do the deducing yourself, that's the whole point of word guess — unlimited rounds at four lengths, hard mode, and challenge links that deal a friend the exact same word. The same instinct powers codewords and cryptograms, where you're deducing letters rather than words, and the anagram solver next door answers the other kind of stuck: letters in hand, no idea what they spell.