Five-letter word games: letters, positions and elimination
Which letters five-letter words share, how repeated letters change yellow clues, and how many words one all-grey guess removes, with counts from the lists.
Published 17 October 2026
The pool you are guessing from
The English list holds 5,185 five-letter words and the Swedish list 9,543. Games usually draw answers from a much shorter list than a spell-checker list, so the helper shows more words than the game will ever pick. Treat the length of the list as an upper bound.
Which letters are common
Counting the share of English five-letter words that contain each letter at least once gives s (48%), e (46%), a (38%), r (31%), o (29%) for the top five. This counts words, not letter occurrences, so a double letter counts once.
A first guess made of common letters in distinct positions tends to turn more tiles yellow or green than one built from rare letters.
What one grey guess removes
If a first guess of "crane" comes back all grey, the answer cannot contain c, r, a, n or e. In the English list that leaves 662 of 5,185 five-letter words, so a bad-looking result still removes most of the list.
Repeated letters and yellow clues
Greens are settled first, then each remaining letter of the answer can turn at most one tile yellow, left to right. Guessing "speed" against "abide" gives grey, grey, yellow, grey, yellow: the answer has one e, so only the first e is yellow and the second is grey.
A grey tile therefore does not always mean the letter is absent. It can mean every copy of the letter in the answer is already accounted for. The helper applies this rule, which is why you should enter the colours exactly as the game showed them.
Choosing the next guess
When few words remain, the best guess is the one that splits them into the most even groups. The helper tries each candidate against the others and ranks by the expected number of words left. With many words left it falls back to letter frequency, which is a rougher guide.
Both rankings only suggest words that could still be the answer.