Examples: solving missing-letter puzzles step by step

Example 1: a quick crossword clue with two known letters

You're partway through a quick crossword. The clue is for a 7-letter word, and two crossing answers have already given you the 3rd letter as R and the 6th letter as N. Everything else is unknown.

Open the word finder, set the length to 7, then click into position 3 and type R, and position 6 and type N, leaving the other five boxes blank. In Type letters mode, both of those become confirmed known letters automatically. The result list narrows from tens of thousands of seven-letter words to a short, manageable set, letting you scan for the one that actually matches the clue's meaning rather than guessing blindly.

Example 2: a Scrabble rack with board-fixed letters

On a Scrabble board, you're trying to place a 5-letter word into a slot where an existing tile already fixes the 1st letter as S and the 4th letter as E. Your rack has the other letters you'd need, but you want to see every legal option before committing a turn.

Set the length to 5, type S into position 1 and E into position 4, and leave positions 2, 3, and 5 blank. Because results sort by Scrabble letter score by default, the words worth the most points appear first, which matters when more than one option would otherwise fit the space equally well. Click a result to drop its letters into the grid and confirm it visually before you commit the play.

Example 3: a Words with Friends rack with one fixed letter

Words with Friends uses a different board and scoring layout than Scrabble, but the same missing-letters mechanic applies whenever part of a word is already fixed by tiles on the board. Say a 6-letter slot has only the 4th letter fixed, as a T from a crossing word.

Set the length to 6, type T into position 4, and leave the rest blank. The result list covers every 6-letter word in the dictionary with T in that exact spot, sorted by score, so you can scan for something that also uses the letters actually available on your rack.

Example 4: a Wordle-style puzzle with a full guess history

This is the case Colour tiles mode was built for. Say you've made one guess in a Wordle-style game and learned: the letter A is correct in position 2 (green), the letter S is somewhere in the word but not in position 1 where you guessed it (yellow), and the letters T and E are not in the word at all (gray).

Switch to Colour tiles mode. Type A into position 2 and click it twice to reach green. Type S into position 1 and click it once to reach yellow. Type T and E into any two empty positions and click each once to reach gray (their exact starting position doesn't matter for a gray mark, since it means "not in the word anywhere"). The result list now reflects all four clues together: A confirmed in position 2, S confirmed present but never in position 1, and T and E fully excluded.

As you make more guesses in the actual game, keep updating the same grid: add newly confirmed green and yellow letters, mark any newly ruled-out letters gray, and the candidate list keeps narrowing.

Example 5: an anagram-style rack with no fixed positions

Sometimes you don't know any position at all, just that a word is a certain length. Set the length and leave every box blank: the result list becomes every word of that length in the dictionary, sorted by score, capped at the top 200 shown at once. From there, either scan for something recognisable or start filling in positions as you rule letters in or out by trial and error, switching to Colour tiles mode the moment you have a gray or yellow clue to add.

Tips for tricky cases

A few situations come up often enough to be worth calling out on their own. If the result list comes back at zero matches, the single most common cause is an off-by-one word length, not a wrong letter, so try the length one step up or down before rechecking every letter you entered. If a word you're confident about doesn't appear at all, it's worth a quick check against the word list page, since the dictionary behind this tool leaves out the rarest tier of English words, proper nouns, and anything with an apostrophe or hyphen.

When a puzzle gives you a double letter, like two E's in the same word, Colour tiles mode handles it correctly as long as each occurrence is marked separately: a confirmed green E in one position and a confirmed gray E in another position together mean "exactly one E, and it's right there", not "no E at all". Mark each tile based on what that specific guess told you about that specific position, and the filtering takes care of the rest. None of your entered letters or colours are sent anywhere outside your own browser while you work through a puzzle; see the privacy policy for the full detail on that.