How Wordle Works
Wordle gives every player the same 5-letter answer for the day and six guesses to find it. Each guess has to be a real word, and the game colors every tile after you submit: green means the letter is correct and in the right spot, yellow means the letter is in the answer but in a different spot, and gray means the letter is not in the answer at all, or every copy of it has already been accounted for by other tiles.
That last clause is where most manual solving goes wrong. A gray tile is not automatically a green light to rule a letter out completely, not once the answer has repeated letters.
Reading Green, Yellow, and Gray Tiles Correctly
Take a guess like ERROR against an answer that only contains one R, in the third position. Wordle would mark the first R gray and the second R green, not both gray and not both green. Read at face value, that gray R looks like it says "no R in this word," which is wrong, the word has an R, just not where the first tile put it. The Wordle hint filter on this page tracks per-letter counts instead of treating each tile as an independent yes/no, so duplicate-letter guesses like ERROR, ABBEY, or SASSY get handled the way the actual game scores them.
| Tile color | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| Green | Correct letter, correct position, locked in |
| Yellow | Letter is in the answer, but not at this position |
| Gray, no other tile of that letter is green/yellow | That letter is not in the answer at all |
| Gray, but another tile of the same letter is green/yellow | The answer has that letter, exactly as many times as the non-gray tiles show, no more |
Picking a Starting Word
A strong Wordle opener is not about a lucky guess, it is about maximizing how much you learn from one guess. Words with five distinct letters test five different letters at once instead of wasting a slot on a repeat, and words built from letters that appear often, in the positions they tend to appear in, are more likely to land a yellow or green somewhere on the board. The Best Openers tab runs that exact calculation against the full dictionary this tool uses, so the ranking updates from real letter data rather than repeating whatever word happened to trend that week.
Wordle Strategy Beyond the First Guess
- Log every guess as soon as you make it. The filter only knows what you tell it, and stale constraints from a guess you forgot to add will make the candidate list wrong.
- Treat your second guess as a second information grab, not a final answer attempt. If the candidate list is still long after guess one, picking a word that shares few letters with your first guess narrows things faster than guessing your best remaining candidate outright.
- Once the candidate list is short, switch from exploring to solving. With five or fewer candidates left, just guess the most likely one instead of continuing to hunt for new information.
- Watch for duplicate letters once you are down to a handful of candidates. Words like LEVEL or ARENA behave differently under the gray-tile rule than words with five unique letters, worth a second look before you submit.
- A short candidate list with no obvious winner usually means a tile got misread. Recheck the colors on your most recent guess before assuming the dictionary is missing a word.
If letter-based puzzles are your thing, the site's Word Solver and Word Unscrambler run on the same real dictionary this filter uses, just aimed at different games. And if a letter grid is more your speed than a guess ladder, Strands' hint toolkit and Waffle's grid solver cover those daily puzzles too.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this page just tell me today's Wordle answer?
No, on purpose. The answer changes every midnight, so a fixed value posted here would be stale within hours and would not teach you anything about the puzzle. This page instead gives you a live filter: log the exact colors your board showed and get every dictionary word still consistent with them.
How many guesses do you get in Wordle?
Six. Every guess has to be a real 5-letter word, and each one comes back colored green, yellow, or gray, tile by tile.
What does a gray tile mean if the same letter is also yellow or green in that row?
It means the answer contains that letter exactly as many times as the non-gray tiles show, not zero. Guess ERROR against an answer with one R and only the second R turns green while the first stays gray, the word has one R, in that spot, not two. This is exactly the duplicate-letter rule the filter above handles automatically.
What is the best Wordle starting word?
There is no single official best opener, but strong ones share two traits: five distinct letters, and letters that show up often, in the positions they tend to appear in, across the dictionary. The Best Openers tab computes that ranking live rather than repeating one popular pick.
Can a Wordle answer repeat the same letter twice?
Yes, past answers have included ABBEY, ERROR, and SASSY among others. That is why the tile logic has to track letter counts rather than a simple yes/no per letter.
Is checking a word here the same as it being a real past Wordle answer?
No. The Word Checker tab confirms a word is real English and exactly 5 letters, which is what Wordle requires to accept a guess. It does not confirm the word was ever an actual daily answer, since that official list is smaller and curated separately by the game.