The Wordle word list, explained

Two lists, two jobs

Wordle has always drawn a line between words it will let you type as a guess and words it will actually pick as the day's answer. The first group is large and permissive on purpose, so that a reasonable, real word is never rejected mid-game. The second group is smaller and more curated, made up mostly of common, everyday words, since a five-letter answer nobody recognizes makes for a frustrating puzzle rather than a fair one.

This site mirrors that same split. The valid-guess list is what determines whether a word you type is accepted at all, and it is also the full pool the solver filters down as candidates. The answer list is used only to flag which of those candidates are historically likely answers, shown as a small badge in the results panel.

The valid-guess list: 14,855 words

This is the same word set the original open-source Wordle codebase shipped with, before the New York Times acquired the game and took the project's source private. It was, and still is, widely mirrored and reused across independent Wordle tools and clones precisely because it was published openly as part of that original codebase. It includes plenty of words most players would never guess (obscure plurals, less common verb forms, regional spellings) alongside every common five-letter English word, which is exactly the point: broad enough that a legitimate guess is essentially never rejected.

Every word in this list was checked before being added to the site: exactly five characters, lowercase a through z only, no duplicates. The full, sorted list is available as a plain text file if you want to inspect or reuse it directly.

The answer list: 2,315 words

This is a smaller, separately published list documenting the words Wordle has used, and was expected to use, as daily answers. It is a proper subset of the valid-guess list above; every word on the answer list also appears on the valid-guess list, but the reverse is not true. Answer words tend to be more common in everyday English, avoid awkward letter combinations, and generally make for a fairer puzzle than an obscure valid-guess word would.

The New York Times has, at times, edited or skipped specific words from lists like this one after acquiring the game, for editorial reasons unrelated to word validity. This list should be read as a historical and statistical reference for which words Wordle answers tend to look like, not as a guaranteed prediction of any specific future date's answer.

How the solver uses both lists together

When you filter guesses on the Wordle Solver page, the candidate pool is always drawn from the full 14,855-word valid-guess list, so the count you see is an accurate reflection of every word that could still be typed and accepted. Separately, each candidate is checked against the smaller answer list, and any match gets a “likely answer” badge in the results.

That badge is a genuinely useful shortcut when the list is still long: if you need to guess without narrowing further, a flagged word is statistically the safer pick, since Wordle answers are drawn from that smaller list far more often than from the broader valid-guess pool. It is a hint, not a guarantee, since the exact rules the New York Times currently uses to pick answers are not public.

Letter frequency across the lists

A quick look at which letters show up most often helps explain why certain starting words test so well; see the starting words guide for how this feeds directly into opener choice. Vowels and a handful of common consonants dominate by a wide margin.

This is exactly the table the solver's own live “best next guess” ranking is built from, recalculated against whatever candidates remain after your actual guesses, rather than fixed to this static top five.

Reusing or checking this data yourself

Both lists are served as plain, sorted text files, one word per line, no formatting beyond that: /data/wordle-valid-guesses.txt and /data/wordle-answers.txt. If you are comparing this tool's behavior against another Wordle solver, or just curious whether a specific word is accepted, those files are the ground truth this site actually filters against, not a simplified summary. They are fetched client-side the same way any other static asset loads; see the privacy policy for exactly what does and does not leave your browser.

What counts as a valid five-letter word here

Every entry in both lists passed the same three checks before it was included: exactly five characters long, made up only of the letters A through Z with no numbers, spaces, or punctuation, and lowercase for consistent comparison. Duplicate entries were removed from each list independently, and the answer list was then checked to confirm every one of its words also appears in the valid-guess list, since an answer that was not itself an acceptable guess would not make sense.

That last check matters more than it might seem. A word list assembled by hand, or scraped from an inconsistent source, can easily end up with an answer word missing from its own guess list, which would make certain puzzles technically unsolvable through the tool. Both lists here were validated against each other specifically to rule that out before publishing.