Wordton

Tools

Wordle Bot

If you searched for this, you probably want the New York Times tool. Here is what it is, who owns it, and how to do most of the same thinking for free.

Written by Blake Boege Last checked

What WordleBot is

WordleBot is a post-game analyser built and run by the New York Times. You finish the day's puzzle, open the bot, and it walks back through your guesses, telling you how many possible answers each one eliminated and what the strongest available guess would have been at each turn. It scores your play for skill and luck. It is a good tool, and it is genuinely theirs.

Wordton is not affiliated with the New York Times. WordleBot is a New York Times product, it requires their subscription, and we do not reproduce it, host a copy of it, or run a bot of our own. Everything below is a manual workflow built from our own tools.

The free version of the same work

WordleBot answers three questions: was my opener any good, how much did each guess narrow things down, and what should I have played instead. You can answer all three yourself, and unlike the bot you can do it during the puzzle rather than after it.

  1. Start from a measured opener

    The bot's most useful habit is telling you your opening word was mediocre. You can settle that before you play: our starting-word rankings score every five-letter word in the dictionary on letter coverage and position, and the current leader is LARES at 228.66. Familiar alternatives sit within a few points of it.

  2. Narrow the field mid-game, not after

    This is the part the bot cannot do for you while it matters. After two guesses you know some letters are in, some are out, and maybe one is placed. Put that into the word finder: length 5, confirmed first letter in Starts with, confirmed last letter in Ends with, yellow letters in Contains. What comes back is the candidate list the bot would have counted. Seeing it shrink from two hundred words to nine is the same lesson, delivered in time to use it.

  3. Take a nudge instead of the answer

    When the board is genuinely stuck, the Wordle hint page gives labelled clues in order, vaguest first, with the answer behind a separate reveal you have to open on purpose. You can take exactly as much help as you want and no more.

What this will not give you

No skill score, no luck rating, and no turn-by-turn replay of a game you have already finished. Those are WordleBot's, and if the numbers are what you enjoy, the subscription is the way to get them. What you get here instead is the candidate list itself, live, while the puzzle is still open.