Double-letter words in Wordle: how to hunt them
What our own word lists say about repeated letters, and the tells that you are in one.
About a third of the five-letter words we work with repeat a letter, and most players guess as if none of them do. In our common five-letter list, 749 of 2,315 words contain a doubled letter. That is 32.4 percent. Repeat words are the most under-guessed shape on the board.
Why do players miss double letters?
Because the habit that makes a good opener makes a bad middle game. You are trained to spend every slot on a fresh letter, so a guess that burns two slots on the same letter feels wasteful. It is not, once the field is small. The second reason is that the feedback is easy to misread. Play a word with two E's when the answer has one, and the second E comes back blank, which reads like "no E" if you are moving fast. Slow down on that tile. A blank on a repeated letter means "not this many", not "not at all".
How often does a five-letter word repeat a letter?
Here is the honest version. We do not have the game's official answer list and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Every number on this page comes from the two word lists that power our own tools: the 2,315-word common list that the Wordle solver treats as likely answers, and the 12,970-word full list behind our 5-letter word pages. In the common list, 749 words repeat a letter, or 32.4 percent. In the full list it is 4,649 words, or 35.8 percent. Ordinary English five-letter words double a letter roughly one time in three, and a player who never guesses one is writing off a third of the dictionary.
Which letters actually double?
Not the ones you would pick at random. E does most of the work and the rest fall away fast. Below are the ten most repeated letters among those 749 words, with how many of the words use each letter twice and whether the two copies sit together or apart.
| Letter | Words | Share of the 749 | Together | Split |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E | 172 | 23% | 59 | 113 |
| O | 81 | 11% | 58 | 23 |
| L | 71 | 9% | 59 | 12 |
| A | 70 | 9% | 0 | 70 |
| T | 61 | 8% | 21 | 40 |
| R | 60 | 8% | 18 | 42 |
| S | 49 | 7% | 36 | 13 |
| C | 29 | 4% | 2 | 27 |
| I | 24 | 3% | 1 | 23 |
| N | 23 | 3% | 14 | 9 |
Those ten cover 640 of the 788 doubled letters in the list. The counts add up to more than 749 because 39 words repeat two different letters, like LEVEL, SALSA, RADAR and QUEUE.
The A row is the one worth memorizing. Not one word in our common list contains AA, so a doubled A is always split: ABATE, AGAIN, ALARM, LLAMA, SALSA. L and S go the other way and prefer to sit together, as in ALLEY, CHILL, ATOLL and BOOST. E is the flexible one and shows up both ways, adjacent in AGREE, BREED, CHEEK and CREEP, split in BELIE, BERET, CEASE and CREPE.
Is the pair together or apart, and where does it sit?
Split wins narrowly. Of the 749 repeat words, 409 keep the two copies apart, as in SALSA, and 340 place them side by side, as in SPEED. When the pair is adjacent it lives in the back half of the word almost every time. Counting by the position of the first of the two letters, 198 of the 340 start at slot three and 72 start at slot four. Only 68 start at slot two, and a mere 2 start at slot one.
Rule of thumb: when you are down to a handful of candidates and one very common letter, usually E, O, L or S, is confirmed but has nowhere sensible to go, try it twice. Put the pair starting at slot three or four, where 79 percent of adjacent doubles begin.
How do I use the solver when a letter appears twice?
Type the guess exactly as you played it, both copies included, and mark each tile with the color the game gave it. The combination is what carries the information. One green and one blank means the answer has exactly one of that letter and you have already placed it. Two colored tiles confirm two. If you drop the second copy to keep your entry tidy, you throw the count away and the tool has to keep words you have already ruled out.
What tells you that you are in a repeat word?
Three signals, and they usually arrive together. Every fresh letter you test comes back blank, which means the answer is recycling letters you already hold. One common letter is confirmed present but every obvious placement for it has been eliminated. And the candidate count has fallen into single digits while the word still refuses to resolve. At that point stop looking for new letters and start looking for a second copy of an old one.
The far end of the list is stranger still. Twenty words in our common list use a letter three or more times, including EERIE, ERROR, GEESE and MUMMY. Those almost never occur to anyone under time pressure, which is exactly why they cost so many people a streak.
Hard mode changes the sums, because every revealed letter has to be reused and a second copy is often the only legal way to spend a slot. The hard mode guide covers what that does to your options, and the second guess numbers show how much room you still have by the time repeats start to matter.