Does this know today's Wordle answer?

No, and no tool that has not seen the New York Times' private list can. What this does is narrow the public dictionary to the words that still fit the board you describe. The answer is somewhere in what comes back, along with words that will never be an answer.

Why is the first word sometimes one I would never guess?

Because the list is ordered by how much a guess would tell you rather than by how likely it is to be right. Early on, a word that splits the remaining candidates roughly in half is worth more than one that might be lucky, because it leaves you somewhere useful either way.

What if a letter is grey on my board but the word still has one?

That happens when you guess a letter twice and the word only contains it once. Put it in the in-the-word box and leave it out of the ruled-out box. The solver also spots the contradiction and keeps the letter rather than returning nothing.

Is there a seven-letter version?

Not here. This solver is built for the five-position board, and the boxes are fixed at five for that reason. For a longer variant, the main word finder searches every length in the same dictionary and takes the same starts-with, contains and excludes filters.

Solvers & tools

Wordle Word Finder

A Wordle word finder that takes the board rather than a search box: the letters you have placed, the ones you know are in the word, and the ones you have ruled out, narrowed against the 8,654 five-letter words in the public-domain list Wordton searches.

Written by Blake Boege

What this is not. Wordton has no access to the day's answer. The New York Times draws from a curated list it has never published, and nothing on the open web has it. This narrows the 173,310-word public-domain dictionary down to the five-letter words your board still allows, which is a larger set than the answer list and contains it.

How the ordering works

Every word that survives your board is scored on one question: how evenly would guessing it divide what is left? For each letter, the solver counts how many of the remaining candidates contain it. A letter in nine candidates out of ten splits the field one to nine, and usually tells you nothing. A letter in five out of ten halves it whichever way the tile comes back. Each letter is worth the smaller of those two numbers, and a word is worth the sum across its distinct letters.

That is why the top of the list is sometimes a word you would never play. A guess is an instrument for asking a question, and the question that halves the field beats the one that might be lucky. Once the list is down to two or three, stop reading the order and just pick one: there is nothing left to learn.

A worked example

You opened with SLATE. The A came back in the word but in the wrong place, the E was green in the last position, and S, L and T were all out. Put A in the in-the-word box, E in the fifth position box, and SLT in the ruled-out box. That leaves 142 words: every five-letter word ending in E that contains an A and no S, L or T. GRACE leads, then RANGE and GRADE, because between them those three separate the field faster than anything else on the list.

One honest limit. The in-the-word box takes letters, not places, so it knows your A is in the word but not that you already ruled out the second slot for it. Words with A in that position stay on the list. If you would rather they did not, the fastest fix is to keep guessing: the next board will place the A and you can move it into a position box.

Common questions

Does this know today's Wordle answer?: No, and no tool that has not seen the New York Times' private list can. What this does is narrow the public dictionary to the words that still fit the board you describe. The answer is somewhere in what comes back, along with words that will never be an answer.
Why is the first word sometimes one I would never guess?: Because the list is ordered by how much a guess would tell you rather than by how likely it is to be right. Early on, a word that splits the remaining candidates roughly in half is worth more than one that might be lucky, because it leaves you somewhere useful either way.
What if a letter is grey on my board but the word still has one?: That happens when you guess a letter twice and the word only contains it once. Put it in the in-the-word box and leave it out of the ruled-out box. The solver also spots the contradiction and keeps the letter rather than returning nothing.
Is there a seven-letter version?: Not here. This solver is built for the five-position board, and the boxes are fixed at five for that reason. For a longer variant, the main word finder searches every length in the same dictionary and takes the same starts-with, contains and excludes filters.