Word Sieve

5 letter word finder: every word your clues leave standing

Type your guess, tap tiles to color them, see what's left.

Five letters, then tap: fit, near, out.

What is measured

What is measured. Which five-letter words still fit every guess row you have locked in. Green fixes a square; yellow means the word holds that letter elsewhere; gray means no more copies than green and yellow already account for. Candidates is every surviving word; "Likely" marks the ones in a common-word pool — a ranking aid, never a claim about the real answer.

How it is kept. The list ships as plain text, wordlist/enable1.txt, indexed into 14 shards totalling 3,203,788 bytes; this page loads only its five-letter slice, 8,624 words, and tests each against your locked rows. The likely band is a separate, smaller pool of ordinary English words (provenance), checked against this same list rather than replacing it.

What it cannot tell you. Whether your puzzle accepts a candidate: nothing here is connected to a running game, and a puzzle can refuse a word the list holds. The best-next-guess card is a strategy over the likely band, not a lookup of any puzzle's real answer.

Questions

How do I enter what the board told me?
Type your guess, then tap each tile: once for green (locked), twice for yellow (elsewhere), a third time back to gray (no more copies). Add row locks it in and opens the next row; the keyboard below tints with what every locked row has shown.
A letter came back gray, but the word still has one. What then?
Tap it gray anyway. Gray is a count, not a ban: with any green or yellow taps on the same letter, it fixes exactly how many copies the word holds. Guess SPEED against a word with one E: one E comes back yellow, the other gray — tap them that way and the filter keeps words with exactly one E.
What is "best next guess", and is it today's answer?
No. It is the guess that leaves the fewest likely answers standing on average, over every way your next clue could come back. "Likely" is a common-word pool, not an answer key — the suggestion is a strategy, never a lookup.
Which dictionary is this, and does it know today's answer?
Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, 172,781 words with 39 entries excluded; this page reads the 8,624 that are five letters long. It does not know today's answer, and no puzzle's answer list is shipped or fetched here. Word Sieve is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Scrabble, Words with Friends, Wordle, or their publishers.
Do the letters I type leave my device?
No. Everything runs in your tab: the page fetches the five-letter index slice and a small common-word pool, both plain files from this site, and tests them locally. The Content-Security-Policy limits connections to this site's own origin. The best-guess search runs in a Web Worker when your browser supports one, and on the same tab otherwise; either way, nothing it computes is sent anywhere.

The rest of the site

Rather play than solve?

Word Game Library runs word games built on the same word lists. Stuck on a round? Come back here and drop your letters in.

How this word list was made
Rows0 Likely— Rare— Candidates— Word listENABLE1 · 8,624 five-letter words