LO__Y: 22 Words, One Pattern, and the Guess That Splits Them
Green L, green O, green Y, and two blanks in the middle. It looks like you're nearly done. Here's why you might not be, and what to guess next.
Three greens on a five-letter Wordle board feels like the hard part is over. L and O at the front, Y at the end: surely the word is right there. Then you start listing candidates and realize how many words fit LO__Y. It's a lot more than two or three.
This is one of the classic Wordle traps: a pattern with lots of answers, many of them built on doubled letters. Guess them one at a time and you can run out of rows before you run out of words.
Every LO__Y word
We put the pattern into Advanced Finder: L green in position 1, O green in position 2, Y green in position 5, nothing else. It found 22 five-letter words.
The ten most common, in Advanced Finder's "Most Common" order:
LOBBY, LOWRY, LOFTY, LOUSY, LOWLY, LORRY, LOLLY, LOONY, LOVEY, LOOPY
And the twelve less common ones:
LORDY, LOSSY, LOOKY, LOAMY, LOCKY, LOOBY, LOKEY, LOURY, LOCHY, LOOEY, LOPPY, LOGGY
Look at how many have a doubled letter: LOBBY, LORRY, LOLLY, LOONY, LOOPY, LOSSY, LOOKY, LOOBY, LOOEY, LOPPY, LOGGY. Doubles are easy to forget when you're listing words in your head, and that's exactly why this pattern catches people.
Advanced Finder with L, O and Y in green and B ruled out: 20 LO__Y words left, most common first.
Don't guess them one by one
With ten realistic candidates and maybe three guesses left, guessing LOBBY, then LOFTY, then LOUSY is a coin-flip strategy. A better move is to spend one guess on a word that isn't LO__Y at all, chosen so that its colors tell the candidates apart.
We checked which ordinary word does that best for the ten common LO__Y words. The answer is WROTE. No single guess separates all ten, but WROTE comes closest: it splits them into seven groups, and no group has more than three words.
| If WROTE shows… | The answer is… |
|---|---|
| Yellow W, R and O | LOWRY |
| Yellow W and O | LOWLY |
| Yellow R and O | LORRY |
| Yellow O, green T | LOFTY |
| Yellow O and E | LOVEY |
| Green O | LOONY or LOOPY |
| Yellow O only | LOBBY, LOUSY or LOLLY |
Five of the seven outcomes leave exactly one word. The other two leave two or three, and by then you know far more than you did. (SWORE does just as well, with a different split.)
The bigger lesson
A board with three greens isn't always close to solved. What matters is how many words still fit, and the only way to know that is to look. When the list is long, one guess that splits it is worth more than one lucky guess.
If you're stuck on a pattern like this, enter your green letters into Advanced Finder to see all possible words before using another guess. You can also mark letters as yellow or grey, or leave them unspecified. Every result will match your letter rules.