Word Sieve

Five-letter clue filter · ENABLE1

Every five-letter word your clues leave standing

A solver for Wordle-style puzzles. Say which letters are locked to a square, which are in the word but somewhere else, and which are ruled out; every five-letter word in a named, public-domain dictionary consistent with all three comes back ranked.

Locked_____ Elsewhere_/_/_/_/_ Ruled outnone Candidates— Word listENABLE1 · 8,636 five-letter words
In the word, not in square

Five squares; use _ for one you know nothing about. A gray letter that is also yellow still goes in Ruled out: it is read as a count, not a ban.

The five-letter shard is not loaded yet. The index ships as 14 plain-text shards, one per word length, totalling 3,204,287 bytes; this filter reaches only shard-05.txt, and the bytes pulled appear here after a filter.

What is measured, how it is kept, and what it cannot tell you

What is measured. One thing: which five-letter entries of a named word list are still consistent with the clues you gave. A locked letter fixes a square, a misplaced letter says the word holds that letter but not there, and a ruled-out letter says it holds no more copies than the other two account for. Every word in the slice is tested against all three, and the readout count is the surviving set's size, not a sample. The starting-words guide ranks openers on this same list.

How it is kept. The list ships as a file, wordlist/enable1.txt, precomputed into a length-sharded index. A positional question cannot be answered from the anagram keys that index is built on — sorting a word's letters throws its positions away — so this page reads the five-letter shard and tests each word. That is a scan, bounded by 8,636 words rather than 172,820, and the page prints the figure. The ranking is recomputed the same way, over the survivors.

What it cannot tell you. Which word a particular puzzle chose. Nothing here is connected to a running game, no answer list is shipped or fetched, and the ranking is a frequency count rather than a guess at a solution. Nor can it speak for words outside ENABLE1 — proper nouns, hyphenations and recent coinages are absent — or say whether a candidate is one your puzzle accepts.

Questions

How do I enter what the board told me?
Three boxes. Locked letters go in the first, one character per square, with an underscore where you know nothing: c__st is C in square 1, S in 4, T in 5. Letters in the word but not in the square you tried go in the small box under that square. Ruled-out letters go in the last box. The same letter yellow under two squares is place clues, never two copies — 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: this filter reads a gray as a count, not a ban. Guess SPEED against a word holding one E and the second E comes back gray while the first is yellow — it means no more copies than the clues account for, not no E at all.
What is the ranking, and is it telling me the answer?
No. It is a frequency count: for each square the filter counts how many surviving candidates hold each letter there, and a candidate's score sums those counts over its distinct letters. The count is over the words still standing, not the dictionary, and it knows nothing about the word a puzzle chose.
Which dictionary is this, and does it know today's answer?
ENABLE1, a public-domain list of 172,820 English words, 8,636 of them five letters long — the slice this page reads. It is a general list, not any puzzle's answer list, and no 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, and it is the browser that stops them rather than a promise on this page. The filter runs in your tab: the page fetches one file, the five-letter slice of its word index, and tests it locally. The Content-Security-Policy pins connections to this origin alone, so a request carrying your clues elsewhere fails before it is made.

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