Find 6 Letter Words by Ending

How to use the ending finder

1. Type the last one to four letters into Word ends with, or tap a chip. The chips are the endings that close the most answers.
2. Read the two counts. Words in the first group can be this game’s answer. Words in the second group are valid guesses on the displayed list that the game never picks.
3. To use a letter you already know, pick its position and type it. A known R in letter 4 keeps only words with R there.
4. Press Find the best guesses. The five guesses that leave the fewest answer-list words appear, with group sizes.
5. Share the page with ?end=ing after the address to open a preset.

Splitting the -ER crowd

Say the last two tiles are green E and R. 81 answers still fit, and 1,462 words on the displayed list end that way. The finder ranks PLANTS first.

PLANTS leaves 3.89 words on average from a field of 81, and no color result can leave more than 7. It makes 33 groups, and 14 of them hold a single word. It shares nothing with the ending, so every letter it tests is new.

Guessing from inside the family does worse. The best in-group guess, LANDER, leaves 9.77 on average, or 2.51 times as many. BETTER, a natural pick, leaves 28.90 with a worst case of 47, because E and R are already known and add nothing.

The finder tried the 682 answers as guesses here. Trying every displayed word would find DALTON at 3.52, a small gain.

How the best guess is chosen

For each possible guess the finder sorts the group by the colors that guess would produce. Words with the same colors share a group. The score is the sum of squared group sizes divided by the group size, which is the average number of words left. The list sorts by that score, then by the smaller worst case, then by more groups, then by a guess that can itself be the answer, then alphabetically.

The work runs in a Web Worker so the page stays responsive. How many guesses it tries depends on the group size. Up to 22 words it tries all 18,094 displayed words. Up to 586 it tries the 682 answers. The biggest answer group is 104 words, for words ending in E, so the button always returns a ranking.

How endings fall in the answer list

Five last letters close most answers: E, D, R, T and S. Together they end 463 of 682 answers, or 67.9 percent.

Only 17 letters ever close an answer. A, B, I, J, O, Q, U, V and Z never do, yet 1,175 displayed words end in one of them, 601 in A alone. The displayed list holds many plurals and verb forms. S closes 4,739 displayed words but only 80 answers, so just 1.7 percent of S words can be the answer.

Across the whole displayed list, 3.8 percent of words are answers. Plain endings like -ES and -S sit below that. Endings that build a word, such as -ING, -LY and -LE, sit well above it. The answer list leans toward base forms, so the displayed list holds far more plurals than this game ever uses.

Crowded endings and how to leave them

The ten biggest two-letter endings close 333 answers, or 48.8 percent, from 104 different two-letter endings. -ER leads with 81 and -ED follows with 71. The same worker as the button produced this table.

The in-group column is the best guess taken from the group itself, and it is worse every time. When a crowded ending locks in, spend the next guess on the front letters with a word that avoids the ending.

The -ATTER trap shows the same effect at a small scale. 11 displayed words end in -ATTER, but only MATTER is an answer. The wider -TTER group holds 7 answers, among them LETTER, BUTTER, BETTER, BITTER, MATTER and SETTER. BAILEE tells all 7 apart at once, while the best guess from the group, BETTER, leaves 1.86 on average. Once a group is down to two or three words, guessing one of them is usually the better move, since it can also win on the spot.

Answer words by ending

Every answer-list word for the most common endings is listed here, so you can read them without the finder. Open an ending to see its words.

Where the lists come from and what splits ignore

The first group is this game’s answer list of 682 words, not an official Wordle list. The second group has 17,412 more words from the displayed list of 18,094. That list is the 18,195 words the game accepts minus 101 that are hidden because they could offend. The accepted words come from the Wordnik word list under the MIT license, credited in the Word Lists and Credits section of the About page.

The finder stores nothing and does its work in your browser. The words you type are not sent anywhere, and the site’s analytics records only the page visit, without any query string. Splits treat every answer-list word as equally likely and ignore how common a word is in English. They also ignore the second group, so they suit this game only. For other games, check both groups. To enter your colors, use the 6 letter Wordle helper. For the opening guess, see the best starting words.