5-letter word solver
Type each guess, tap its tiles to match the colours your game showed, and the solver lists every five-letter word that still fits. It handles repeated letters the way popular daily five-letter word games score them, and suggests the next guess that leaves the fewest possible answers on average. A strong opener from our list is RAISE.
Your guesses
Type a guess and press Add, then tap each tile until its colour matches your game. Tap order: gray, yellow, green.
No guesses yet. A strong first guess from our list is RAISE: on average it leaves 52.5 of 2,084 common answers.
In numbers
| Five-letter words in our list | 8,609 |
|---|---|
| Common five-letter words | 4,423 |
| Best opener (model with 2,084 possible answers) | RAISE: 52.5 words left on average |
| Most common last letter (common words) | S (32.9%) |
| Most common first letter (common words) | S (13.7%) |
How the colours are read
Instead of turning colours into rules by hand, the solver uses the definition directly: a word stays on the list only if guessing your word against it would produce exactly the colours you entered. That covers every repeated-letter case automatically, including the tricky ones:
| Guess | Answer | Colours | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPEED | ABIDE | gray, gray, yellow, gray, yellow | Exactly one E (not 3rd or 4th), a D (not 5th), no S or P |
| GEESE | THOSE | gray, gray, gray, green, green | S and E are in place; the other Es are gray because THOSE has one E |
| EERIE | BREED | yellow, yellow, yellow, gray, gray | At least two Es and an R; the third E is gray, so exactly two Es |
Colours are scored the standard way: green letters first, then yellow from left to right while the answer still has unused copies of the letter, everything else gray. The tiles here show a symbol as well as a colour (● green, ◐ yellow, – gray), and you can change a focused tile with the keyboard: G, Y or X, or 2, 1, 0.
Picking the next guess
“Best next guesses” are ranked by the average number of words that would remain after the guess, assuming each remaining common word is equally likely to be the answer. When more than 600 words still fit, we rank by how many remaining words contain each letter instead, which is much faster and points in the same direction. Words that cannot be the answer are sometimes the better guess, because they rule out more letters at once; they are labelled.
Strategy in more detail: five-letter word game strategy and how repeated letters are coloured.
Questions people ask
How do I use the 5-letter word solver?
Type the word you guessed and press Add guess. Tap each tile until it shows the same colour as in your game: gray, yellow or green. The list below updates after every tap and shows only the words that would give exactly those colours.
What does a gray letter mean if the same letter is also yellow or green?
It means the word has no more copies of that letter. Guess SPEED against the answer ABIDE: the first E turns yellow and the second gray (gray, gray, yellow, gray, yellow), because ABIDE has exactly one E. The solver reads that as “exactly one E, not in positions 3 or 4” instead of excluding E.
What is the best first guess?
Calculated over 2,084 five-letter words in SCOWL size ≤ 35 that our spelling rule does not flag as plurals or past tenses, RAISE leaves 52.5 possible answers on average – the lowest of any word that can itself be the answer. The full table is in our guide to the best starting words.
Does this give today’s answer?
No. We do not publish daily answers. The solver only narrows down words from the colours you enter, so it works for any day and any game that scores five-letter guesses this way.
Why is “Common words only” on by default?
Our assumption is that daily games tend to pick frequent words as answers. Our list has 8,609 five-letter words, but only 4,423 appear in SCOWL at size 50 or below. Untick the box if a rare word might be the answer, as in some game variants.
Sources
Updated by Daniel Gavalec. Every number on this page is calculated from our word list by a script – see how the word list is built. Found an error? Tell us.
Related tools
- 5-letter wordsCommon five-letter words, letter statistics and a filter for all of them.
- Word finderFilter by start, end, pattern like c?a?e, letters to include or exclude, and length.
- Words with these lettersWords that contain all the letters you choose, in any order, plus any others.
- Word unscramblerEvery word you can make from your letters, longest first. Use ? for blank tiles.