Guess Solver
Tell it what your guesses revealed and it lists every word still standing. Letters you have placed, letters you know are in the word but not where, and letters you have ruled out entirely.
Enter what your guesses revealed and the possible words appear here.
Three kinds of knowledge
A guess in a letter-position game tells you three separate things, and they need entering separately. A letter you have placed belongs in its slot. A letter you know is in the word but guessed in the wrong spot goes in two places: the “in the word” field, and the slot where it is ruled out. A letter your guess eliminated goes in “not in the word”.
That middle case is the one people enter incompletely. If you guessed CRANE and the R came back as present but misplaced, you know two things — the word contains an R, and its R is not second. Recording only the first leaves hundreds of dead candidates in the list.
What makes a good opener
An opening guess is worth judging by how much it eliminates rather than by how likely it is to be right. Words built from the commonest letters — E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S, L — cut the field hardest, which is why openers like RAISE, SLATE and CRANE keep being recommended. All three are in the dictionary here; try them and watch the candidate count fall.
Repeated letters are the common trap. A second guess reusing a letter you have already placed learns less than one spending five fresh letters, so unless you are down to a handful of candidates, a throwaway guess made entirely of untested letters is often the faster route to the answer.
Why this list is not the answer list
Candidates come from the Tournament dictionary, the public-domain ENABLE list of about 168,000 words. Individual puzzles run against their own curated answer lists, which are much smaller and usually exclude obscure words, plurals and past tenses. So this list is a superset: everything the puzzle could ask, plus words it never would.
In practice that means ordering matters. When several candidates remain, the everyday word is the better guess, because answer lists lean heavily toward common vocabulary. Results here are ordered by Scrabble score within each length, so scan for the plainest word rather than the top one.
Common questions
- How do I enter what I know?
- Type a letter into a slot when you know its position. Put letters you know are present but misplaced into "in the word", and letters your guesses ruled out into "not in the word". Leave the rest blank.
- Why is a word missing from the list?
- The list is drawn from the Tournament dictionary, which is the public-domain ENABLE word list. Individual puzzles use their own curated answer lists, so a word can be valid here and not be an accepted answer, or the reverse.
- Does it work for lengths other than five?
- Yes. Change the word length and the slots follow. Six and seven-letter variants of the same guessing game work the same way.