How Wordle Handles Duplicate Letters (and How to Play Them)

How Wordle scores repeated letters

Short answer: greens are claimed first, yellows are then paid out only up to the number of times the letter appears in the answer, and every spare copy goes grey. That one rule explains every confusing duplicate you have ever seen. A grey copy of a letter does not necessarily mean the letter is missing. It can simply mean the letter’s copies have already been “used up” by other tiles. And with 31.7% of answers containing a repeated letter, you meet this rule constantly whether you notice it or not.

The scoring runs in two passes over your guess:

1. Count the letters in the answer. Before any tile is coloured, each letter in the answer contributes one copy to a running tally.
2. Greens claim first. Every guess letter sitting in exactly the right position turns green, and each green consumes one copy of its letter from the tally. This pass covers the whole word before a single yellow is awarded.
3. Yellows take what is left.The remaining tiles are read left to right. A tile turns yellow only if unclaimed copies of its letter are still in the tally, and it consumes one when it does. Once a letter’s tally reaches zero, every further copy goes grey.

This is not a paraphrase of something we read elsewhere. It is precisely the algorithm inside our Wordle Solver: one shared feedback function computes greens first across the whole word, then yellows left to right from the remaining counts. The same function powers the entropy rankings across this site, so the rule on this page is the rule the tools actually run.

Example 1: extra copies go grey

You guess LLAMA and the answer is METAL, which contains one L and one A.

No letter is in the right position, so the green pass claims nothing. The yellow pass then works left to right. The first L takes the only L in METAL and turns yellow, so the second L finds the tally empty and goes grey. The first A takes the only A, leaving the final A grey too. Read the row carefully and it is generous: the answer contains exactly one L, exactly one A and an M, all in other positions.

Example 2: greens claim first, even later in the word

This is the case that makes players think the game is broken. You guess SLOSH and the answer is GHOST, which contains a single S.

The first S sits before the fourth S when reading left to right, yet it is the green S in position four that gets paid. Greens are settled across the whole word before any yellow is considered, so the opening S finds no S left in the tally and turns grey even though S is plainly in the word. If yellows were awarded first instead, the green tile could never have appeared at all, which is why the game resolves exact positions before near misses.

Example 3: doubles in the answer itself

Repeats cut both ways. Guess ERASE against the answer SPEED and both Es earn a colour, because SPEED really does contain two of them.

Two yellow Es tell you the answer holds at least two Es. And because no copy of E went grey, a third E has not been ruled out. The single yellow S promises at least one S somewhere else. Feedback on duplicates is always a statement about counts, not just membership.

What the colours tell you about counts

Three counting rules fall straight out of the scoring passes above:

• Coloured copies set a minimum. If two copies of a letter come back green or yellow, the answer contains that letter at least twice.
• A grey copy makes it exact. If any copy of the letter went grey in the same guess, the coloured copies are the exact count. One yellow L plus one grey L means exactly one L.
• All copies coloured leaves the ceiling open. If every copy you played was coloured, the answer may still contain more copies than you guessed.

This is hard information, and most players throw it away. Tracking exact letter counts is one of the quietest ways to cut your candidate list, and it costs nothing.

How common are repeated letters?

Across the 1,352 curated answers, 428 contain a repeated letter, which is 31.7%, roughly one answer in three. Triples are genuinely rare at just 6 answers. The letters that double up most often are led by E, which appears twice in 88 answers.