Five-letter word finder from green, yellow and grey letters

… loading the word list Common words first, A to Z inside each group. Tap a word to see its letter pattern.

Order Common first A to Z

Best next guesses

Loading the best first guesses…

Guess from Any valid word Could still be the answer

Each guess is played against every common word still in the list (SCOWL size 35 or smaller, the probable answers; every remaining word if none is common), and those words are grouped by the green, yellow and grey pattern the guess would show. Words left is the average size of the group the answer would land in, worst is the largest group, and lower is better for both.

How it reads your colours

Every guess gives three kinds of evidence, and the finder keeps all of it on one board:

Green fixes a letter in its spot.
Yellow says the letter is in the word but not in that spot. A letter can be yellow in several spots across guesses, so each yellow box takes more than one letter.
Grey says the answer has no more copies of that letter than your guesses already coloured.

Worked example. Guess CRANE against the answer TREAT: C grey, R green, A yellow, N grey, E yellow. Enter R as the second green, A in the third yellow box, E in the fifth, and C N as grey. The five-letter list drops from 8,614 words to 25, and the 12 common ones (BREAD, DREAM, GREAT, TREAT among them) come first, all 25 with R second, an A that is not third, an E that is not last, and no C or N.

Repeated letters

The games colour a repeated letter one copy at a time, so a letter can be yellow or green and grey. The finder reads that the way the games mean it: exactly as many copies as are coloured, no more. Yellow E plus grey E means one E, not in the yellow spot. Green E plus grey E means one E, the green one.

A yellow E from one guess and a green E from a later guess are almost always the same E, so they count as one copy. The one case the board cannot see on its own: a single guess that coloured the same letter twice (guess EERIE against THEME gives a yellow E first and a green E last). That proves two copies, so type E into Coloured twice in one guess.

What this cannot do

No daily answers. It does not know today’s puzzle and never will; it only shows every word your letters still allow.
The list is ENABLE, not a game’s answer list. ENABLE is a public-domain Scrabble-style list of 172,823 words. It has no proper nouns and plenty of obscure words (AALII, XYSTI), so the count here is usually larger than the handful a game would accept as an answer.
“Common first” is a dictionary grade, not a prediction. Each word gets one of four tiers from SCOWL (Kevin Atkinson’s Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), which splits English into dictionary sizes from 10 (the most basic words) to 95 (everything its author could find): common is in size 35 or smaller, everyday first appears at 40-50, less common at 55-70, and rare at 80-95 or not at all. Of the 8,614 five-letter words, 3,480 are common, 951 everyday, 1,817 less common and 2,366 rare; CRANE and HOUSE are common, AALII is less common, XYSTI rare. Size 35 includes plurals and verb forms of its words, so ACHED and ABETS count as common too. SCOWL grades how widely a word appears in English dictionaries; it is not a game’s answer list and knows nothing about today’s answer. It only reorders: every word that fits is still listed, and A to Z restores plain alphabetical order.
Slurs are removed. 89 words that are racial, ethnic, homophobic, transphobic or ableist slurs (and their plural or -ed forms) are dropped before the list reaches your browser, so they are never shown, even when they would fit. A few innocent homographs go with them; profanity that is not a slur is kept.
English letters A to Z only, words of 4 to 8 letters.

Where the words come from

The list is enable1.txt from the dolph/dictionary repository on GitHub, pinned to one commit and checked by hash, then split by length: 3,887 four-letter, 8,614 five-letter, 15,211 six-letter, 23,089 seven-letter and 28,410 eight-letter words. Everything runs in your browser; what you type is not sent anywhere.

source=dolph/dictionary/enable1.txt (ENABLE, public domain) commit=c65f04b0b5b27a981f437b940cf62fe71320d5ec fetched=2026-09-29 rows=172823 sha256=3f16130220645692ed49c7134e24a18504c2ca55b3c012f7290e3e77c63b1a89 kept=4:3887,5:8614,6:15211,7:23089,8:28410 filtered=89

The commonness tiers come from SCOWL 2020.12.07 (its english-, american- and british-words lists, so COLOR and COLOUR grade alike), fetched once at build time and checked by hash. A word takes the smallest SCOWL size that contains it; possessives and capitalised names are skipped, and no word is added from SCOWL. Its permissive notice is kept verbatim in LICENSE-SCOWL.txt.