About WordHintly
An independent word-puzzle helper, built and run by one person. No accounts, no sign-up, nothing to install.
What this is
WordHintly works out which words are still possible in a letter-guessing game once you have made a few guesses. You type what you played, set each tile to grey, yellow or green exactly as the game coloured it, and the list narrows. It also suggests the guess that eliminates the most remaining words, which is often not a word that could be the answer at all.
Why it is built the way it is
Two things here are done differently from most solvers, and they are the reason the site exists.
- Repeated letters are handled exactly. Candidates are filtered by replaying the
game's own colouring rule rather than approximating it with contains/excludes logic, which is where
most solvers quietly go wrong. Guessing
ERRORagainstOTHERscores exactly one R here, as it does in the game. - Results are ordered by how ordinary a word is, not alphabetically. A five-letter dictionary holds over six thousand words and almost none of them are plausible answers, so ranking by everyday frequency puts the words you actually want at the top.
Where the words come from
The word list is expanded from the en_US Hunspell dictionary, which derives from Kevin Atkinson's SCOWL. Word frequencies come from SUBTLEX-US (Brysbaert & New, 2009), a 51-million-word corpus of film and television subtitles — spoken, everyday English rather than literary English, which is closer to how puzzle answers are chosen. Definitions come from WordNet 3.0, Princeton University.
This is not any game publisher's official tournament word list, so a word will occasionally differ from what a particular game accepts. Proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated forms are left out deliberately.
Independence
WordHintly is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The New York Times, Hasbro, Mattel, Zynga or any other game publisher. Game names are referred to only to describe what the tools help with. The site is supported by advertising; see the privacy page for what that means for your data.
Corrections
If a word is missing, a definition reads wrong, or something is broken, tell me and I will fix it — [email protected].