Two lists, two jobs
Octordle on Octordly.org uses two separate word lists. The answer list is where the eight hidden words come from. The guess list is every word the game will accept when you press Enter. The two are very different in size, and knowing why saves you a few puzzled moments.
The answer list is a general list of 6,139 English words from four to eleven letters long. For each game, only the words of the length you are playing are kept. At the default length of five letters that leaves 953 possible answers. Each of the eight boards gets a word picked at random from those 953, with no word used twice in the same game.
The guess list is much bigger: 40,805 words in all, of which 12,743 have five letters. That is about 13 accepted guesses for every possible answer. Every answer is also on the guess list, so a correct word is never rejected.
Why some odd words are accepted but never appear as answers
The answers are mostly familiar nouns, the kind of word most players know straight away. The guess list is closer to a full word-game dictionary. It includes rare, technical and old-fashioned words, plural forms and alternative spellings. Words such as OATER (a western film), AEROS or REALO are accepted as guesses, but you will never have to find them on a board.
That split works in your favor. A strict guess list would reject perfectly good scouting words, while an answer list full of obscure words would make games feel unfair. You are free to use any accepted word to test letters, and you can count on the answers being words you have a fair chance of knowing.
If a word you know is rejected, it is simply missing from the guess list. Check for a typo first, then try another word; the rejected attempt does not use up a guess. If you think a common word is missing, or that an answer is too obscure, let us know through the contact page.
What the 953 Octordle answers look like
We counted the 953 five-letter answers in the game's English list to see which letters and patterns come up most. Percentages are the share of answers that contain the letter at least once.
| Letter | Share of answers | Letter | Share of answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| E | 46.5% | I | 27.3% |
| A | 42.6% | L | 27.1% |
| R | 38.1% | N | 23.8% |
| O | 32.8% | C | 23.3% |
| T | 29.7% | H | 19.0% |
| S | 28.4% | U | 17.0% |
At the other end, Q is in 1.4% of answers, J in 1.3%, and X and Z in 1.0% each.
Position matters too:
- First letter: S leads (16.4% of answers), then C (11.5%), P (7.6%) and B (7.1%).
- Second letter: A (14.6%), O (12.8%) and R (12.5%) are most common.
- Middle letter: A again (15.6%), then I (11.2%) and O (10.7%).
- Fourth letter: E (12.7%) is the clear favorite.
- Last letter: E ends 20.0% of answers, then T (11.9%), R (9.3%) and Y (8.1%). Only 3.1% end in S, because the answers are rarely plurals.
Repeated letters and vowels
288 of the 953 answers, about 30%, contain at least one repeated letter, and 123 have a double letter side by side. Fifteen answers repeat two different letters, and five use the same letter three times. The letters that repeat most often are E, O, L, A, T and R. With eight boards per game, that works out to two or three repeated-letter words in a typical game.
Most answers have two vowels: 60.9% contain exactly two of A, E, I, O and U, 29% have one and 10% have three. Only a single answer has none of the five, and it relies on Y. Y itself appears in 11.1% of answers.
These numbers drive the opening sets on the strategy page, where we tested pairs and triples of starting words against every answer.
Other word lengths and languages
If you change the length in Settings, the same answer list is cut to that length instead. Four-letter games draw from 778 answers and accept 5,575 guesses; six-letter games draw from 1,066 answers and accept 22,487 guesses.
All the numbers on this page are for the English list the game has always used. Octordle can also be played with 17 other languages and dictionaries, chosen from the language menu, including English (UK). Each of them uses its own list of five-letter words, so its answers, accepted guesses and letter patterns are different.
No spoilers here
We do not publish the answer list or any day's answers, and this page only reports counts. The daily puzzle is picked from the same 953 words using your device's date, so it is just as fair, and just as unpredictable, as a random game. Any answer can come up again in a later game, because the game does not keep track of which words you have already seen.
How we counted: we took the answer file the game loads, kept the five-letter words exactly as the game does, and counted letters with a short script. The guess counts come from the game's accepted-words file, as served in October 2026.