How to find five-letter words from a letter pattern

Sometimes you know a few letters but do not need the full guess-history solver. A pattern search is useful when you can identify exact positions, letters that must appear somewhere, or letters that cannot appear in the answer.

Use question marks for unknown positions

Enter five characters in the pattern field. Keep letters in positions you know and use a question mark for every position that is still unknown. For example, C?A?E means C is fixed first, A is fixed third, E is fixed fifth, and the second and fourth positions can vary.

Add letters that must appear

The required-letter field narrows the list to words containing each letter you enter. A required letter does not have to occupy a particular position. Enter repeated letters when the answer must contain more than one copy.

Exclude letters you have ruled out

The excluded-letter field removes words containing any of those letters. Do not exclude a letter just because one copy was gray if another copy in the same guess was green or yellow. Wordle can use mixed colors to show a maximum number of repeated letters.

Combine the fields carefully

A letter cannot be both required and excluded. A fixed letter in the pattern also cannot be excluded. When no words match, review the pattern first, then check required and excluded letters for conflicts. The list is based on the site's reference dictionary and can differ from a game's accepted-answer list.