SWEET has two E’s. BLOOM has two O’s. GREEN has — well, three letters’ worth of E. Double-letter answers are where Wordle’s rules get genuinely tricky, and where most wrong guesses are born. This guide explains the exact counting logic, with worked examples from our own daily word list.
If you have ever stared at a board thinking “but I proved that letter is gray!” — this is the article for you. And if the basics are still fresh, the full rules live in How to play Wordle.
The one-sentence rule
Colors are assigned to copies of a letter, not to the letter itself — and green claims are settled first. Every misunderstanding about duplicate letters comes from forgetting one half of that sentence.
The algorithm, step by step
When you submit a guess, the game does not color tiles left to right. It runs two passes:
- Pass one — greens. Every letter that matches the answer in the same position turns green, and that copy of the letter is consumed (removed from the available pool).
- Pass two — yellows. Every remaining tile checks the leftover copies of its letter in the answer. If an unconsumed copy exists, the tile turns yellow and consumes it. If none remain, it turns gray.
That is the entire system. Green first, yellow second, gray last. Now let us run it on real words.
Worked example 1: the answer is GREEN, you guess ERASE
GREEN is one of the daily answers in our rotation, and it is a monster: one G, one R, two E’s.
- Pass one: position 2 of your guess is R, and position 2 of GREEN is R — green. That R copy is consumed. Positions 0, 2, 3, 4 (E, A, S, E) do not match their positions, so nothing else is green yet.
- Pass two: the leftover copies of the answer are G, E, E, N. Your position 0 is E — an unconsumed E exists → yellow, and that E copy is consumed. Position 2 is A → no A in the answer → gray. Position 3 is S → gray. Position 4 is E — the last E copy is already used → gray.
Final board: gray, green, gray, gray, gray. Read it carefully: two of your E’s came back different colors. The first E proved “there is an E, but not here”; the second E proved nothing new — because the answer’s second E was already claimed. This is the pass-two pool in action.
Worked example 2: the answer is SWEET, you guess TEETH
SWEET contains S, W and two E’s plus one T. Your guess TEETH contains two T’s and two E’s.
- Pass one: positions 1 and 2 are E and E — both match SWEET’s E’s → green, green. Both E copies consumed.
- Pass two: leftovers are S, W, T. Your position 0 is T → an unconsumed T exists → yellow, consumed. Your position 3 is also T → the T pool is empty → gray. Position 4 is H → gray.
Final board: yellow, green, green, gray, gray. The lesson: two T’s in your guess produced only one yellow. A second copy of a letter can only ever earn a color if the answer actually holds a second copy — otherwise it comes back gray, and gray here does not mean “there is no T in the word”. It means “no additional T”.
Worked example 3: one yellow does not promise a second copy
Say the answer is BLOOM and you guess LLAMA. Pass one: nothing matches. Pass two: your first L finds one L in BLOOM → yellow. Your second L finds no leftover L → gray.
The trap is reading that gray as “L is not in the word” — the yellow right beside it already falsified that. The gray second L says something more precise and more useful: the answer contains exactly one L. Narrow information, but real information.
What the keyboard tells you
The on-screen keyboard collapses a letter’s history into its best result, with green outranking yellow and yellow outranking gray. If a letter was yellow yesterday-position and gray in another guess, it shows yellow — because “somewhere else” is strictly more informative than “not there” when copies are uncertain. One consequence for duplicate-letter situations: a gray keyboard tile can coexist with a green tile of the same letter elsewhere in your grid. Trust the grid, not the summary — the tiles are per-copy truth, the keyboard is per-letter summary.
How common are repeated letters, really?
Far more common than players expect. In classic Wordle answer lists, roughly one in six answers contains a repeated letter; in our daily rotation of thirty words, it is three of thirty — BLOOM, GREEN and SWEET — about one puzzle in ten. Small enough that you should not chase doubles early, common enough that you must not rule them out late.
Strategy: three habits that catch doubles
- When two candidate words fit and one has a double, test the double. Single-letter words are “used up” by your earlier clues; doubles are the blind spot the clues have not touched.
- Re-test a letter in a new position before declaring it dead. If a yellow E has not found a home by guess four, consider a word with E twice — the answer may simply have more E than you assumed.
- Never spend guess five on a word that violates a proven constraint. Most duplicate-related losses are not logic failures; they are hope replacing deduction on the second-to-last turn.
One related rule: the strict dictionary
Repeated letters also interact with word validation. If your guess is rejected outright, no colors are revealed — which sometimes saves you from misreading a double. Why real words get rejected, and how the accepted list differs from the answer list, is the subject of Why was my word rejected?. And for the daily practice loop that makes these rules instinctive, today’s puzzle is waiting — with a Start over button that is very handy for testing exactly these edge cases.