Finding a five-letter word from partial information is a filtering problem. You start with every possible word and remove the ones that break a clue, until only a few remain. Doing that well comes down to two things: writing your clues down precisely, and applying the ones that remove the most words first.
1. Write down exactly what you know
Most clues fall into one of four kinds. Keeping them separate avoids the most common mistakes.
- Letters in a known position. “The second letter is R.” These are the strongest clues. Write them as a pattern with a placeholder for each unknown, such as
?R???. - Letters in the word, position unknown. “There’s an E somewhere.” Keep a separate list of these.
- Letters in the word but not in a particular place. “There’s an O, but it isn’t third.” Note both halves. The letter is included, and one position is ruled out for it. In the finder, put the letter in “Must include”, then skip any results that have it in the ruled-out spot.
- Letters that aren’t in the word. Keep these as an exclusion list, and double-check it against your other clues so you don’t exclude a letter you know is present.
2. Apply the most restrictive clues first
A fixed letter in a known position usually removes more candidates than anything else, because it rules out every word with a different letter in that spot. Next come rare included letters: knowing a word contains a J, Q, X or Z cuts the field enormously. Common letters narrow the list less. There are 11,454 five-letter words in our list, and E alone appears in 5,042 of them.
Exclusions work the other way round. Ruling out a common letter such as E or A removes a lot of words, while ruling out Q hardly changes anything.
The most common letters in five-letter words
This table counts how many of the 11,454 words in our list contain each letter at least once. Letters near the top are the most useful to test early, because a yes or a no tells you something about many words.
| Letter | Words containing it | Share of list |
|---|---|---|
| s | 5,230 | 46% |
| e | 5,042 | 44% |
| a | 4,740 | 41% |
| r | 3,492 | 30% |
| o | 3,416 | 30% |
| i | 3,191 | 28% |
| l | 2,817 | 25% |
| t | 2,721 | 24% |
| n | 2,485 | 22% |
| u | 2,117 | 18% |
3. A worked example
Here’s how the list shrinks as clues come in during a typical word puzzle. Each step adds one clue to the ones before it, and each count comes from the finder’s word list.
- Before any clues: 11,454 possible words.
- A first guess shows R and E are in the word, positions unknown. 1,677 words remain.
- The same guess rules out A, I, S and T. 418 words remain.
- A second guess puts E in the last position. 107 words remain.
- …and shows R is second, with O somewhere in the word. 22 words remain.
After four clues the candidates are broke, brome, crone, crore, croze, drome, drone, drove, erode, frore, froze, grope, grove, krone, orgue, probe, proke, prole, prone, prore, prove, wroke. Some are obscure, so the familiar ones are the sensible next guesses. When choosing between several, pick the one whose untested letters split the rest most evenly.
4. Choose guesses that test new letters
In puzzles where you guess and get feedback, the guess that gives you the most information is often not a likely answer. A word made of five untested, common letters tells you more than a word that repeats letters you already know about. Save the “probably right” guesses for when the list is short.
5. Watch out for repeated letters
Repeated letters are the most common reason a search goes wrong. If you know a word has two Ls, typing LL in the finder’s “Must include” field requires both. If a game has told you a letter appears only once, add it to the exclude list as well: the finder then keeps words with exactly the copies you’ve placed and removes words with extras.
6. Check your clues when nothing matches
If a search returns no words, one of the clues is usually wrong. The quickest checks are:
- Is a letter both in the pattern and in the exclude list by mistake?
- Does the pattern have exactly five positions?
- Did you type a letter into “Must include” that you meant to exclude, or the other way round?
Remove the least certain clue and search again. The guide to the finder’s filters covers each field in detail, and common five-letter word patterns can suggest where vowels and consonants are likely to fall.