Wordle Solver

What it is doing

Every coloured row is a constraint. Green fixes a letter to a position. Yellow says the letter is present but not there. Grey caps how many times the letter can appear. The solver takes all your rows together and keeps only the words that satisfy every one of them at once.

That is all it is — no guessing, no ranking by cleverness. Which is why the list shrinks so fast: two informative guesses usually take five thousand candidates down to under twenty.

Duplicate letters, properly

This is the rule almost every solver gets wrong, so it is worth spelling out. Wordle colours a guess in two passes: greens first, then yellows against whatever letters of the answer are left over. A letter you guessed more times than the answer contains comes back grey on the extras.

So if you guess SPEED and see the first E yellow and the second E grey, the grey does not mean "no E". It means "exactly one E". A solver that treats grey as "letter absent" will throw away the right answer and then tell you nothing is left. This one derives a minimum and a maximum count per letter from each row, which is the same thing the game does in reverse.

Getting more from each guess

• Guess one is for information. Five different common letters. Repeats waste a slot, and rare letters usually come back grey and tell you little.
• Do not chase greens too early. With four greens and a dozen candidates differing in one position, a word you cannot win with that tests four of those letters at once is often the better play.
• Watch the endings. When several candidates remain, they usually differ at the end rather than the start — English has far more variety in word endings than beginnings.

The list is bigger than the game's

The search runs over every valid five-letter word in a public-domain lexicon — thousands of them. The game itself draws answers from a much smaller curated list of ordinary words. That means the true answer is almost certainly in what you see here, but so are a lot of words the game would never use. When you are down to a few candidates, prefer the one that sounds like something a person would pick.