6 Letter Ending Patterns and How to Use Them

The last tile of a six-letter puzzle is far from uniform. In this site’s 682-word answer pool, 463 answers — 67.9 percent — end in one of just five letters: E, D, R, T, or S. Nine letters never appear in the final position at all.

That skew is worth exploiting in both directions. Before the ending is known, it tells you which final letters are worth testing first. After a green tile lands in position six, it tells you how much of the pool just disappeared — and which page on this site narrows the remainder fastest. This page maps the ending families across the whole pool; the final-E and final-Y pages go deep on one letter each.

The ending landscape of the 682-answer pool

Only 17 different letters close an answer in the current pool. The counts fall off quickly:

The remaining seven letters — W, M, C, F, P, K, and X — close 29 answers combined. A, B, I, J, O, Q, U, V, and Z never end a word in this pool, so a gray tile on any of them says nothing extra about position six.

The last two letters concentrate almost as sharply. The top ten combinations cover 333 of the 682 answers, or 48.8 percent:

These are exact counts from the local answer-pool file, not frequency estimates for English at large. A different pool would produce different numbers.

Three kinds of endings, three different reads

Ending families are not all the same kind of thing, and the difference changes how much of the word is still unknown.

Inflectional endings: -ED, -ING, and final -S. These are grammatical machinery bolted onto a stem. The pool contains 71 -ED words, 32 -ING spellings, and 80 words ending in S — 183 answers, or 26.8 percent of the pool, and the three groups never overlap because each has a different final letter. When one of these endings is confirmed, the word’s real identity lives in a stem of roughly four letters: WALKED is WALK plus machinery, THINGS is THING plus machinery. Spend the next guess entirely on fresh consonants and vowels for those front slots.

The traps are the lookalikes. Among the 71 -ED words, EXCEED, INDEED, and SACRED are the only three that are not past-tense forms. Among the 32 -ING spellings, SPRING and STRING carry those letters inside the root, and DURING no longer behaves like a verb. Among the 80 final-S words, ten keep the S as part of the root rather than a plural or verb ending: ABACUS, ACCESS, ALWAYS, COSMOS, CRISIS, FAMOUS, SERIES, STATUS, STRESS, and UNLESS. A solver who assumes every -ED word has a verb stem will discard SACRED exactly when it matters.

Derivational endings: -LY, -TY, and participial -EN. These build new words rather than inflect them, but the strategic read is similar: the ending is a suffix, the front is the payload. The pool’s 26 -LY words include the familiar adverbs, but FAMILY, COMPLY, and SUPPLY only look suffixed. Of the 23 -EN words, eleven are past participles — BEATEN, BROKEN, CHOSEN, DRIVEN, FALLEN, FROZEN, GOTTEN, HIDDEN, MOLTEN, PROVEN, STOLEN — while GARDEN, LISTEN, and SUDDEN simply end that way.

Built-in spelling structure: -LE, -CE, -GE. Here the ending is not a suffix at all; it is how English spells the root. The final E in the pool’s 33 -LE, 8 -CE, and 8 -GE answers exists for spelling reasons — a syllabic L, a soft C, a soft G — so there is no short stem to isolate. These words are constrained instead by the letter in position four or five, which is exactly what the letter-specific pages filter on.

Front-attack after the ending locks: the -ER case

-ER is the largest two-letter family, with 81 of the 682 answers (11.9 percent). Suppose positions five and six are green as E and R. What is known about the front four slots?

Recomputed from the current file: position three holds N in 20 of the 81 words (CENTER, DINNER, WINNER), and position four is most often T (15 words) or D (14 words). Counting whole words rather than slots, A appears somewhere in the first four letters of 27 candidates, N in 24, T in 23, and D in 22. Repeats matter too: 15 of the 81 carry a second E in the front four slots (KEEPER, LETTER, TENDER) and 20 carry a second R (CORNER, DRIVER, WORKER), so E and R are not dead letters just because they are already green.

Feedback simulation makes the next choice concrete. Testing every answer-pool word as a probe against the 81 -ER candidates, using the same two-pass feedback rules as the starter-word experiment, the standout is PLANTS: it sorts the 81 words into 33 distinct feedback patterns, its worst pattern leaves only 7 candidates, and its expected remaining count is 3.889. That worst bucket is BORDER, DIFFER, DRIVER, GROWER, HIGHER, JOGGER, and WORKER — the all-gray outcome. NATION is the runner-up by worst case, capping every branch at 9.

The contrast is instructive: guessing inside the family wastes the two letters you already have. The best -ER probe, TENDER, still leaves a worst-case bucket of 21. BETTER leaves 47, and SUMMER — with its repeated M on top of the known E and R — produces only 12 patterns and a worst case of 54 out of 81. Once an inflection-like ending is locked, the strongest move is usually a probe that shares nothing with it.

This simulation draws probes from the 682-word answer pool only; the full accepted-guess list could contain a stronger splitter. The numbers above are measurements of this site’s data, not claims about the official game.

When to switch to a letter-specific page

This page is the map. Once the sixth tile is actually confirmed, a dedicated tool narrows faster than any summary table:

• Final E is green. Use the 241-record final-E finder, which filters the larger accepted-guess file by the letter in position five — its -LE group alone holds 70 records — and offers a clearly labeled vowel-consonant-E spelling-shape toggle. In the answer pool, 104 words end in E and 51 of them match that shape, so the toggle splits the field nearly in half.
• Final Y is green. Use the 113-record final-Y page, which leads with a previous-letter control (37 -LY, 13 -TY, and 12 -RY records in its file) and includes a measured probe simulation for surviving the wide -LY branch.
• Constraints span positions. When the board mixes greens, yellows, and grays that no single ending page captures, enter everything into the feedback-based candidate solver instead.
• The first tile is the green one. Ending pages cannot help with position one; switch to the starting-letter hub.

Other confirmed final letters route through the ending-letter hub, which lists whichever single-letter pages are currently published.

The general habit: use ending families to decide what kind of word remains and where its information lives, then hand the actual filtering to the page built for that constraint.

Data review: August 23, 2026. Every count on this page — the final-letter table, the two-letter ending table, the inflection tallies, and the -ER probe simulation — was recomputed from the published answer-pool file, version answers-ef976d79dbc2_guesses-27c282147058. Formulas, pool boundaries, and the correction process are documented in the word-list methodology.