How Nine Across works

The word list

We start from SCOWL, an open project that publishes English word lists by dialect and by how common each word is. We use its British lists and remove spellings that are American only, so colour is in and color is out. That leaves 110,139 words, 6,389 of them with five letters.

Proper nouns, hyphenated words and words with apostrophes are left out. It is a general dictionary, not the official Scrabble dictionary, so a rare Scrabble word may be missing. The Strands solver uses a wider list of 4 to 16 letter words that includes American spellings, because Strands is an American puzzle.

The answer list

Five Across and the starting word ranking use a list of common words that we choose from the dictionary: words that appear in the commoner SCOWL lists, with plurals, regular -ed and -ing forms and a short list of offensive words taken out. For four to seven letters that gives 9,028 words, and 2,011 of them have five letters. This is our own list. It is not the list the New York Times uses for Wordle.

Best Wordle starting words

We play every five letter word in the dictionary as a first guess against each of the 2,011 answers, using the standard Wordle colour rules. For each guess we count how many answers still fit the colours that come back, then average those counts. A lower average is better. RAISE comes out best, leaving 52 answers on average. The ranking says how well a word narrows our list. It does not say how it would do against the real Wordle answers, which we do not have in advance.

Where the tools run

The anagram solver, unscrambler, word finder, crossword solver, codeword solver, random word generator and Wordle solver all run in your browser against the list above. Letters you type are not sent to us. Results appear as you type because the list is already on your device.

Daily puzzle data

Wordle, Connections and Strands answers come from the public data that the New York Times publishes for each puzzle. A scheduled job checks just after midnight UK time and again in the early morning, and the site rebuilds when a new puzzle appears. Each daily page shows the time it was last updated.

How the hints are made

Wordle hints are generated from the answer: how many vowels it has and whether they touch, whether a letter repeats, the letters in alphabetical order, the first and last letters, and a rhyme when we can find a common word with the same ending. Connections hints use the group names and one starting word. Strands hints use the theme clue, the number of words and the spangram. We do not copy hints from other sites.

Hints are sealed until you ask for them. A page that shows an answer says so at the top.

Independence

Nine Across is an independent site. Wordle, Connections and Strands belong to The New York Times Company, and we have no connection with them.

Corrections

If a word is missing, a hint is wrong or a tool misbehaves, tell us on the contact page.