Five-letter word finder

How to use it

Put each green letter in its box. Put yellow letters in the box where they appeared, so the finder knows the letter is in the word but not there. Type every grey letter into the last field. The list keeps only words that fit all three.

Picking the next guess

Common words come first because puzzle answers are usually everyday words. Early on, a guess that tests new vowels and frequent consonants (R, S, T, L, N) tells you more than one that only confirms what you know.

A worked example

Say your first guess is CRANE and the game shows R in yellow, E in green and C, A, N in grey. Put E in the fifth green box, R in the second yellow box (it is in the word, but not second), and type CAN into the grey field. The finder now only shows words that end in E, contain R somewhere other than the second letter, and have no C, A or N, such as THREE, SHORE and WHERE. What is left is a short list you can scan in seconds.

Three ways to narrow a list

• Known positions. A green letter is the strongest clue. Browse by letter position, for example words with A second and E fifth.
• Letters anywhere. Yellow letters are in the word but not where you put them. Use the “containing” lists to see words with all of them.
• Letters ruled out. Grey letters remove the most words early on. The “without” lists show what is left once a common letter is gone.

Where the words come from

The list is built from an open English dictionary used by spell checkers. Each word carries a frequency band, so common words are listed first and rare ones in grey. Puzzle answers are almost always common words, so the top of a list is the best place to look. Meanings come from WordNet, Princeton's open lexical database.

Good first guesses

Strong openers test frequent letters: two or three vowels plus common consonants such as R, S, T, L and N. Avoid repeating a letter in your first two guesses; every new letter you test either confirms or removes a large share of the possible words.

What the word list tells you

Across all 6,328 words, the letters that appear most often are E (46%), S (45%), A (40%), R (31%), O (29%), I (27%). The rarest are Z, X, J, Q, so a word with one of those is a long shot until other clues point to it. The most common first letters are S (13%), C (8%), B (7%), P (7%), T (6%), and the most common last letters are S (29%), E (11%), Y (11%), D (7%), R (6%). Most of the words that end in S are plurals, so after S the endings to test first are E and Y.

Vowels matter too: 33% of five-letter words have exactly one vowel, 58% have two and 9% have three. Only 0% have none of A, E, I, O and U, and most of those use Y instead, as in LYMPH or NYMPH. About 34% of the words repeat a letter, as in APPLE or SHEEP, so when the obvious candidates run out, try a double.