Color Checker for 6 Letter Wordle

How to run a check

1. Type the answer into the first box. Any six letters work.
2. Type your guess into the second box. As soon as both boxes hold six letters, the tiles and every step appear.
3. Read the tiles first. Then follow the two passes under them: greens are settled in the first and yellows in the second.
4. Look at the letter cards at the bottom. Each card gives the fewest and the most copies of that letter that the row proves.
5. Tap Swap words for the reverse row, or choose a tricky row to start from. You can also open the sample row directly with both boxes filled.

One real row: LETTER against SECRET

The daily word for puzzle #48 (May 6, 2026) was SECRET. A player who opens with LETTER gets this.

The guess holds two Ts and the answer holds one. The first T finds a copy in the pool and turns yellow. By the time the second T is read, the pool has no T left, so it turns gray. Both Es are green because positions 2 and 5 match exactly. Only 2 words from the answer list and 14 of the 18,094 displayed words fit these colors, and every one of them contains a T. Reading the gray T as “no T anywhere” would throw all of them away.

Why greens go first and the rest go left to right

If yellows came first, a misplaced letter could take the copy that an exact match needs. Checking greens first prevents that. Take the guess EFFEEE against the answer COFFEE: the Es at positions 5 and 6 turn green and green, so the Es at positions 1 and 4 find nothing left and turn gray. Those gray tiles come first in reading order but last in priority.

Left to right matters only when copies are scarce. If a guess shows a letter twice and the answer has one copy, in neither spot, the left tile is yellow and the right one is gray. It is never the other way around.

Counting copies: minimum and maximum

A row proves two numbers for each letter it contains. The minimum is the count of green and yellow tiles of that letter. The maximum depends on gray tiles of the same letter in the same row:

• A gray tile alongside a green or yellow one pins the count. The maximum equals the minimum.
• A letter with no gray tile has a minimum but no maximum from this row.
• A letter whose tiles are all gray is absent, so both numbers are 0.

Position rules come with the colors. A green tile fixes that letter in that spot. A yellow tile bans the letter from the spot where it sits, even though the letter is in the word. A gray tile on a letter that is also green or yellow bans it from that spot too, and only caps the count.

Two real rows show the arithmetic. SECRET against SIMPLE gives S a minimum of 1 with no cap, while E has a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 1. EFFEEE against COFFEE pins E at 2 and gives F a minimum of 2 with no cap.

Across several rows, do not add counts. A later row usually shows the same physical letters again. Keep the largest minimum you have seen for each letter and the smallest maximum.

How common are repeated letters?

Doubled letters are not a rare corner case. In this game’s answer list, 326 of 682 words repeat at least one letter, which is 47.8 percent. Across the 18,094 displayed words the share is 52.6 percent.

Most of them repeat just once. 261 answers hold one letter twice and 53 hold two letters twice. Another 12 use one letter three times. No answer repeats a letter four times, although 26 displayed words do.

The most common position shape is a double letter in the middle, as in BATTLE with 57 words. The next is a repeat at positions 2 and 5, as in SECRET with 30.

E is the letter that repeats most. It doubles up in 112 of the repeating answers, or 34.4 percent, well ahead of R with 39 and T with 37.

Where a gray tile misleads

To measure the risk, every word on the answer list was played as a guess against every other answer. That makes 464,442 rows. In 90,729 of them, 19.5 percent, at least one gray tile sits on a letter that the answer does contain. Among guesses that repeat a letter, which is 222,006 rows, the share climbs to 40.9 percent. E is the gray letter in 46.4 percent of the affected rows.

The worst guess overall produces such a tile against 502 of the 681 other answers. Among words this page can name without hinting at a future answer, the worst is ENGINE with 482.

These three pairs come from the word lists. They show the three ways a repeated letter can be colored, and we hold no records of what any player typed.

• Green and gray: GENTLE against SIMPLE. The answer has 1 copy of E, and 16 answer-list words still fit.
• Yellow and gray: SECRET against SIMPLE. The answer has 1 copy of E, and 7 answer-list words still fit.
• Green, yellow and gray: BEEFED against GENTLE. The answer has 2 copies of E, and 16 answer-list words still fit.

In each row, a solver that bans the gray letter outright removes the true answer. The safe habit is the one from the section on counts: keep the letter and cap its count. The 6 Letter Wordle Helper does this automatically when you enter a board.

What the checker computes and where its numbers come from

The checker colors a row with the game’s own function, named WordleFeedback. It builds its explanation from a separate replay of the two passes. Build tests compare the two on thousands of random pairs.

The statistics use this game’s answer list of 682 words and, where stated, the 18,094 displayed words. The displayed words are drawn from a full list of 18,195 words that descends from the Wordnik word list (MIT license). The About page has the full credit. The answer list is not an official Wordle list, and the percentages describe it only.

Both boxes work locally. No word you type leaves the page, and the page keeps no copy.