Wordle Helper Guide: Pattern, Contains & Excludes
Wordle gives you three kinds of information with every guess — green tiles (right letter, right place), yellow tiles (right letter, wrong place) and grey tiles (letter not in the word). WordScout's 5-Letter Finder turns exactly those three clues into three fields. This guide shows you how to fill them in, with examples, and then covers the unscrambler for rack-based games like Scrabble.
The three fields, mapped to your tiles
- Pattern — your 🟩 green letters. Write the 5-letter shape of the answer with a letter where you know it and _ where you don't. If the third letter is R, the pattern is __r__.
- Must contain — your 🟨 yellow letters (plus any green letters, if you like — greens are already in the pattern, so this field is mainly for yellows). The word must include each of these letters at least once. Type a letter twice if you know the word contains it twice.
- Must not contain — your ⬛ grey letters. The word cannot include any of these.
A worked example
Say your first guess is CRANE and the tiles come back: C grey, R yellow, A green, N grey, E grey.
- Pattern: A is confirmed in position 3 → __a__
- Must contain: R (yellow — it's in the word, just not in position 2) → r
- Must not contain: C, N, E (grey) → cne
Run the finder and every remaining possibility appears at once — words shaped like __A__ that include an R and avoid C, N and E. From a list of thousands of 5-letter words, one good guess usually leaves only a handful.
Watch out: the repeated-letter trap
The trickiest Wordle situation is a letter that appears twice in your guess and gets one yellow/green and one grey — for example guessing SASSY when the answer has only one S. The grey S does not mean "no S at all"; it means "no second S". WordScout handles this the safe way: a letter listed in Must contain is never treated as banned, even if it also appears in Must not contain. If you know a word contains a letter exactly once, the cleanest approach is to put it in Must contain and simply not add it to the pattern in a second spot.
One more nuance: a yellow letter also tells you the letter is not in the position you guessed. The finder doesn't track that automatically — if the remaining list is short, just skip any candidate that puts the yellow letter in the same spot again.
Unscrambler tips (Scrabble, Words With Friends, anagrams)
- Longest first is deliberate. Results are grouped by word length, longest at the top, because longer words usually score more and use up awkward tiles.
- Blank tiles are ? — type a question mark for each blank (up to two). A ? can become any letter, so results grow quickly; the group counts help you skim.
- Hunting a bingo? In Scrabble, using all 7 tiles earns a 50-point bonus. Enter all 7 letters and look at the 7-letter group first.
- Short words win games too. Don't ignore the 2- and 3-letter groups — they're how you play in tight corners and hook onto existing words.
- Mind the dictionary. WordScout uses a large, generous English list (370,000+ words), so it may show rare or archaic words your game doesn't accept. When in doubt, your game's own dictionary is the final judge.
A fair-play note
Using a helper against the computer, for practice, or when you're truly stuck is good fun. Using one against friends who aren't is between you and your conscience — WordScout just finds the words; what you do with them is your call.