Wordle helper

How the filter thinks

The helper searches a list of 8,506 five-letter English words and keeps only the ones consistent with your clues. Greens are exact: a letter in a position box must appear in that spot. Yellows require the letter to be somewhere in the word, and if you add the position you tried, like a3, words with A in the third spot are also thrown out, which is exactly what a yellow tile tells you. Grays exclude a letter everywhere. One deliberate wrinkle: if a letter appears in your grays and also in your greens or yellows, the gray is ignored, because that combination really means "the word has this letter, just not twice", and excluding it entirely would wrongly delete the answer.

Results cap at 400 matches with the first 120 shown, and above 60 candidates the tool nudges you to add clues rather than read a phone book.

Using it like a solver rather than a crutch

Always enter yellow positions, not just yellow letters. A bare "a" only demands the word contain an A; "a3" additionally kills every word with A third, which routinely halves the candidate list. You paid a guess for that positional information; do not leave it on the table.

The stronger technique is to run the helper before your middle guesses, not to pick the answer but to pick the probe. When 40 candidates remain, scan them for the letter that splits the field most evenly, and guess a word containing it even if that word cannot be the answer. If half your candidates contain R and half do not, one R test is worth more than a hopeful stab at a one-in-forty solve. This is how strong players actually use a filter list, as a map of what is still unknown.

Reading the candidate list

The word list here is larger than the curated answer pools most daily puzzles draw from, on purpose, so it never misses a legal word. The cost is that some suggestions are too obscure to ever be a puzzle answer. When choosing among candidates, weight toward ordinary vocabulary; the answer to a mainstream daily puzzle is far more likely to be STONE than SHONE's stranger cousins further down the list. If the tool says nothing fits, the culprit is almost always a mistyped yellow position or a letter accidentally left in the gray box from a previous round.

Limits worth knowing

The filter handles the common clue situations exactly, but it does not model full duplicate-count logic. If a gray copy of a repeated letter tells you the word has exactly one E, the helper requires at least one E and may still list a few words with two. Those cases are rare and easy to prune by eye. Candidates are shown in dictionary order, not ranked by likelihood or letter frequency; the judgment layer is left to you, partly because that is the fun part and partly because a ranked list would effectively play the game for you. Everything runs in your browser against the bundled word list. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and the helper works just as well on any five-letter word game with the green, yellow, and gray convention, not only the famous one.