Can letters repeat in Wordle? Rules, does game have double letters - how to find daily 5 letter words answer

Wordle’s iron-like grip on millions of people’s morning routines continues to tighten, with the addictive and communal word game captivating the world.

While the rules of the game are fairly well established by this point, confusion reigns whenever Wordle decides to drop in a word containing two or more of the same letter.

So how does one approach this situation? Are there any tactics to help a player get ahead of this infuriating quirk of the game?

Here is everything you need to know.

What is Wordle?

Firstly, a little context on the game of Wordle, an online brain teaser which lies somewhere between a crossword and a sudoku puzzle.

Anyone who knows the game Mastermind, which employs the use of coloured pegs, will instantly be familiar with the premise of Wordle.

The objective of the game is to guess the secret word in six tries, using a series of hints to figure it out.

For now, you can play Wordle on the Power Language website. (though its recent acquisition by the New York Times has fans concerned this may change in the future).

There is only one puzzle released each day, so you’ll need to check the website again the following day to continue playing along.

Users can share how many tries it took for them to crack the puzzle on social media, as, after it’s been solved, the website offers players the option to share their results.

This share option generates an emoji grid which replicates the colour pattern found on your completed puzzle, using the black, yellow and green emoji boxes.

Sharing like this allows players to share their results entirely spoiler-free.

Can letters repeat in Wordle?

Yes, letters can repeat in Wordle.

Previous Wordle answers have included “naval”, “evade”, “serve”, and “karma”.

There are many more examples of past answers making use of words with repeating letters too, so it’s a certainty that some future ones will also.

That can be frustrating for many players, who assume that each word in the Wordle answer must be different. This is not true.

There is a way of seeing whether a Wordle solution does include a double letter through the game’s established hint system.

If you input a word containing two or more of the same letter as a guess, it will be treated in just the same way as any other attempt would.

That is to say, if those letters are in the correct place, they will be highlighted green; if they are contained within the answer but are currently positioned incorrectly, they will be highlighted in yellow.

If you’ve input two of the same letter and one of them is greyed out, this indicates that only one of that letter appears in the final word.

What are some good double letter tactics?

If you suspect a daily Wordle to be dealing with double letters, there are a couple of tactics you can use to help you figure it out.

Thankfully, since Wordle deals only with five-letter words, that narrows down where double letters could appear within the answer somewhat.

The repeating letter combinations tend to be double letters like “ss” (as in “glass”) or “nn” ( as in “sunny”) and so on.

You could also try to think of double letters in the middle of words - like “fully” or “paddy” - or at the end, like “three” and “dress”.

Of course, this won’t account for any words in which the repeated letters are separated by other letters - like in “abate” or “eager” - so if one of these crops up, you may just have to accept your enviable Wordle streak is about to come screeching to a halt.

Can words repeat in Wordle?

It may not surprise you to learn that Wordle’s database of potential answers does not include all of the over-13,000 five-letter words in the English language.

That would make for some frustratingly obtuse solutions on certain days, with obscure words flummoxing the majority of users, though an early prototype of the game did take this all or nothing approach.

“I just dumped every five-letter word in the English language from whatever dictionary I found online,” said Wordle creator Josh Wardle. “So there were some very obscure words in the English language that I have never heard of.”

This led to a very different game, one in which players would often end up “brute-forcing” their way to an answer.

So instead, the finalised version of Wordle actually pools its daily answer from a relatively limited set of words - just 2,315.

Those words were chosen by Wardle’s partner, who categorised them into those she knew, those she did not know, and those she might have known.

But while that figure may seem limited compared to the vast amount of five-letter words available, it should ensure that it’s a good while before any repeat words start showing up in Wordle.

At the time of writing, the world is figuring out the answer to Wordle #233.

That leaves 2,082 fresh potential daily answers before repeats might start to become an issue. That’s over five-and-a-half years of Wordling.

By then the game could look very different to how it does today, and may have been added to or refined further by its new custodians, The New York Times.

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