Word Sieve

Five-letter clue filter · ENABLE1

5 letter word finder: every word your clues leave standing

A solver for Wordle-style puzzles. Enter the letters locked to a square, the letters that are in the word but somewhere else, and the letters ruled out. Every five-letter word in the dictionary that fits all three comes back, ranked by how common its letters are among the words still standing.

Locked_____ Elsewhere_/_/_/_/_ Ruled outnone Candidates— Word listENABLE1 · 8,624 five-letter words
In the word, not in square

Five squares; type _ for one you know nothing about. A gray letter that is also yellow still goes in Ruled out.

The five-letter shard is not loaded yet. The index ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,203,788 bytes. This filter loads only shard-05.txt, and the bytes it pulls appear here after a filter.

What is measured

What is measured. Which five-letter words in the list still fit your clues. A locked letter fixes a square. A misplaced letter means the word holds that letter somewhere other than the square you tried. A ruled-out letter means the word holds no more copies of it than your other clues account for. Every five-letter word is tested against all three, and the Candidates count is every word that survives. The starting-words guide ranks openers on this same list.

How it is kept. The list ships as a plain text file, wordlist/enable1.txt. Before publication it is split into an index with one file per word length, keyed by each word's sorted letters. Sorting throws away letter positions, so this page loads the five-letter file and checks each word in it against your clues. That scan covers 8,624 words out of the list's 172,781. The ranking is then counted over the survivors.

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. Proper nouns, hyphenated forms and recent coinages are not in the list.

Questions

How do I enter what the board told me?
Green letters go in the first box, one character per square, with an underscore for a square you know nothing about: c__st is C in square 1, S in 4 and T in 5. A letter that is in the word but not in the square you tried goes in the small box under that square. Gray letters go in the Ruled out box. A letter yellow under two squares rules out two places and still counts as one copy; only greens, or a gray, pin the count.
A letter came back gray, but the word still has one. What then?
Type it into the ruled-out box anyway. The filter reads a gray as a count: together with your other clues, it sets exactly how many copies of that letter the word holds. Guess SPEED against a word with one E, and the first E comes back yellow while the second comes back gray. Enter the yellow E and the gray E, and the filter keeps words with exactly one E.
What is the ranking, and is it telling me the answer?
No. The ranking is a frequency count. For each square, the filter counts how many surviving candidates have each letter there, and a candidate's score adds up those counts over its distinct letters. The counts come from the words still standing, so they change as you add clues.
Which dictionary is this, and does it know today's answer?
Word Sieve's ENABLE1-derived edition, with 39 entries excluded: a public-domain English word list of 172,781 entries. This page reads the 8,624 that are five letters long. It does not know today's answer: it is a general word list, 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 clues I type leave my device?
No. The filter runs in your tab: the page fetches one file, the five-letter slice of its word index, and tests it locally. The site's Content-Security-Policy limits connections to its own origin, so your browser blocks any request that would carry your clues somewhere else before it is made.

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