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Five-Letter Word Finder
Enter what you know about the word — letters in the right place, letters in the wrong place and letters that aren’t in it — and matching words appear as you type.
Type each ruled-out letter once, in any order.
Loading 5-letter words…
Searched on your device — nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Works in your browser. No account needed.
Frequently asked questions
Does it help with the daily five-letter word puzzles?
Yes. The green, yellow and grey boxes match the colour clues those puzzles give after each guess, so you can copy your clues straight in and see which words are still possible. It lists candidates rather than telling you the day’s answer, so you still choose the guess.
What does a yellow letter do exactly?
A letter in a yellow box must appear somewhere in the word, but not in that position. If you tried “r” as the second letter and it came back yellow, type r into the second yellow box; the results will all contain an r, none of them in second place. Add more letters to the same box after later guesses.
How are repeated letters handled?
If a letter is both green or yellow and grey — for example you guessed a word with two Es and only one lit up — the tool reads it the way the puzzles colour guesses: the word has exactly as many copies of that letter as your green and yellow clues show, and no more. Two green Es require at least two Es.
Where do the words come from?
From ENABLE2K, a public-domain word list used by many word games: 8,600 five-letter words after removing a short list of slurs and profanity. About 3,400 of them are marked as everyday words because they also appear in the smaller, common-word levels of the SCOWL lists. Puzzle answers tend to be familiar words, so those are listed first.
Why is the answer I expected missing?
Check that no letter is typed in two contradictory places, such as green in one box and grey with no other copies. Proper nouns and offensive words are not in the list, and a small number of words one game accepts may be missing from ENABLE2K, or the other way round.
About this tool
This five-letter word finder narrows a dictionary down to the words that fit what you already know. Green boxes pin a letter to a position, yellow boxes say a letter is in the word but not at that position, and the grey box rules letters out entirely. Every change filters the list instantly, so you can type clues in as you get them and watch the candidates shrink.
It is built for the daily five-letter word puzzles, where each guess colours letters green, yellow or grey, but it works just as well for crossword gaps, word ladders or any game that gives you partial letters. Switch the length to 4, 6, 7 or 8 letters for puzzles that use other word lengths.
Results come in two groups: everyday words, which are the likelier answers, and less common dictionary words, which can still be useful as probe guesses. Above the list, the tool shows which letters you haven’t used yet appear in the most remaining words — guessing a word with several of them often rules out many candidates at once.
Words come from ENABLE2K, which its authors placed in the public domain, with slurs and profanity removed. The everyday-word marking uses SCOWL by Kevin Atkinson; its copyright notice ships with the data at /data/words/LICENSE.txt. Only the list for the chosen length is downloaded (about 52 KB of plain text for five letters), and all filtering runs in your browser.