Don't Wordle Solver: How to Avoid Guessing the Word

There is a delightfully contrarian little game called Don't Wordle. It is Wordle in reverse: the goal is to not guess the word in six tries. The twist that makes it hard is that every guess still has to obey the clues you've already turned up - greens stay put, yellows must move, grays are banned - so the set of words you're allowed to play keeps shrinking until you get cornered into the answer.

So I built a Don't Wordle Solver. Enter your guesses and the colors you got, and it tracks the same constraints the game does, shows how many valid words are left, and recommends the safe ones to play.

What makes a word safe

The trick is that Wordle's allowed-guess list (about 13,000 words) is much bigger than its answer pool (about 2,300). Any word that respects the clues but is not in the answer pool simply cannot be the hidden word, so it is always safe to type. The solver surfaces those first (in green), ranks them to reveal as little as possible so the pool stays large, and flags the words that could actually be the answer in red. When the count drops dangerously low it nudges you to spend an UNDO.

One subtlety: unlike a normal Wordle solver, this one does not assume past Wordle answers are off the table. Don't Wordle picks its word independently of the New York Times schedule, so every word in the answer pool stays risky.

It joins the Wordle, Hardle, and Poople solvers in the games collection. Free, ad-free, runs entirely in your browser. Go avoid some words.