How repeated letters change the colors

A gray tile does not always mean “this letter is absent.” When the guess uses a letter more times than the answer does, the extra copies are gray and the copies that do exist can still be yellow or green.

The two passes

The solver scores a candidate in the same order as the puzzle. The first pass marks exact matches green and counts the unmatched letters left in the candidate. The second pass walks the remaining guess letters from left to right. A leftover copy becomes yellow. If none is left, the tile is gray.

APPLE against the guess ALLEY

APPLE contains one L. ALLEY contains two. The A is green. The first L is yellow, because that single L is still available and is not in the guessed position. The second L is gray, because the yellow tile already used the only L. The E is yellow, not green: it sits where APPLE has an L. The Y is gray.

The pattern is green, yellow, gray, yellow, gray. APPLE stays. A word with two Ls does not.

Why the whole pattern is the check

The filter does not keep a private rule that “gray L means no L anywhere.” For every submitted row it scores the candidate, then keeps the candidate only when all five tiles match the colors you entered. Later guesses are added to that test. They do not erase earlier rows.

If the list drops to zero, the colors and the dictionary disagree. Change a tile. The list recalculates. The solver will not drop a mark to invent a match.

Open the solver and mark the row the way the puzzle showed it. For how suggestions are ranked, read how a next guess is chosen.