A puzzle solver is the right tool for a different problem than an answer page. An answer page tells you today's solution. A solver takes *your* board — the Wordle pattern you're stuck on, the Queens grid from a friend's screenshot, a Spelling Bee hive from last Tuesday — and works it out. HintSheet has six, all running entirely in your browser, nothing uploaded, no sign-up.
Each solver is built around how the game actually constrains the answer. The Wordle solver filters a word list by your tile colours and sorts what's left by the most common letters. The Queens solver enforces the no-touching rule that makes the puzzle. The Connections helper deliberately *doesn't* solve anything: it lays out the letter patterns among the sixteen words and lets you decide.
The solvers are also the reason HintSheet's Dle and LinkedIn coverage doesn't need playable clones. If you want to play, the games are one link away on every guide; if you want to check your work, the tools are here.
Every solver
What each solver does
In the order people use them most.
- Wordle solver — enter each guess, set the tile colours, and get the words still possible from a 15,910-word dictionary, sorted with the most common letters first. Handles repeated letters the way the game does.
- Spelling Bee solver — centre letter plus six outer letters in, every matching word in a broad dictionary out, grouped by length, pangrams marked, points totalled. It finds far more words than the game accepts; the answers page has the Times' own list.
- Queens solver — paint the colour regions of any LinkedIn Queens board, 5×5 to 11×11, and get the crown placement.
- Tango solver — tap in the given suns and moons and the = and × signs; the 6×6 completes itself.
- Zip solver — place the numbers in order, add walls, and get a path that fills every cell, on boards from 5×5 to 8×8.
- Connections helper — paste sixteen words and see shared beginnings and endings, words hidden in other words on the board, anagram pairs and other letter patterns. It never groups the words for you.
How they're built, and why that matters
All six are small pieces of JavaScript that run on your device. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The word lists for the Wordle and Spelling Bee solvers come from a public-domain English word list (dwyl's english-words), filtered and split so a page only loads what it needs — the Bee solver downloads only the words containing your centre letter. Those lists are much broader than the Times' own: on the 40 Spelling Bee hives from 1 September to 10 October 2026, the Bee solver found 188 words a day on average where the game accepted 47.
The logic solvers (Queens, Tango, Zip) use plain backtracking with the game's own constraints. Typical boards solve as soon as you press the button; a large Zip board with few numbers takes longest, because there are more paths to try. Each returns "no solution" rather than a wrong grid when the entered board is inconsistent — usually one mis-painted cell or a misplaced wall.
Using a solver without ruining the game
The honest use of a solver is *after* you've tried. Use the Wordle solver to see what a better third guess would have been, not to skip guessing. Use the Queens solver when a board has beaten you and you want to see which deduction you missed — the Queens guide names the four moves so you can find it. Use the Connections helper when you're down to eight words and the meanings don't cohere.
If you want to avoid spoilers entirely, the hint pages — Connections, Wordle, Strands — are staged so you see only what you ask for.
Solvers that aren't here, and why
There's no Strands solver because Strands is a search of a fixed board that the game's own hint system already assists, and a solver would just be the answer page. There's no Pinpoint or Crossclimb solver because the puzzle *is* the trivia. There's no Mini Sudoku solver yet; the 6×6 can be worked by hand with the techniques on its guide. Patches and Wend solvers may follow.
Accuracy, and the honest limits
The logic solvers are exact: given a correctly entered board, Queens, Tango and Zip return a solution or say there isn't one. The word tools are only as good as their dictionary, which is a broad public-domain list rather than the Times' curated one — so the Wordle solver's top suggestions are often obscure (with no guesses entered they start TARES, ARIES, and the game rejects ARIES), and the Bee solver lists many words the game rejects while missing some it accepts, such as NAAN and ROMCOM. The Connections helper makes no claims at all; it surfaces patterns and leaves the judgement to you.
If a solver gives a result that's wrong for a board you've entered correctly, the contact page reaches the editor, and the aim is to ship the fix the same day.
Reader questions about the solvers
"Does the Wordle solver know today's word?" No. It filters by your colours only.
"Can the Queens solver read a screenshot?" Not yet. Paint the regions by hand — it takes about a minute.
"Why is the Bee list different from the game's?" The solver searches a broad dictionary; the game uses a curated list. HintSheet's Spelling Bee answer pages show the game's own list for each day.
"Will there be a Strands or Pinpoint solver?" Probably not — see the section above on why.
A short guide to each solver's inputs
The thirty seconds that save five minutes.
- Wordle — type the guess, tap tiles to cycle grey → yellow → green, add. Enter the guesses in the order you played them.
- Spelling Bee — one centre letter, six outer letters; order doesn't matter; the list loads when the centre is entered.
- Queens — choose size first, then paint. Each region one colour; every cell painted; as many regions as rows.
- Tango — cells cycle empty → sun → moon; switch to = or × and tap the circle between two cells for a sign.
- Zip — tap cells in order for 1, 2, 3…; switch to Walls and tap a border to block it.
- Connections helper — paste all sixteen words; read the patterns; decide.
How the Wordle solver ranks, in detail
After filtering by your feedback, the solver builds two frequency tables from the surviving words: how often each letter appears in each of the five positions, and how many words contain each letter at all. Each word is then scored by summing its letters' positional frequencies plus twice their overall frequencies, counting each distinct letter once so that repeated letters don't inflate the score. The top of the list is the word whose letters are most common among what's left. It is a simple heuristic, not WordleBot's analysis, and it does not know which words the Times is likely to choose: on 26 September 2026 (answer ELEGY), after SLATE and CRONY it listed GLUEY, GLEBY, BLUEY, GLEDY and FLUEY ahead of ELEGY.
What it doesn't do: recommend non-candidate test words. In normal mode with a large candidate list, a word that can't be the answer but tests five fresh letters can be a better move, and the Wordle guide explains when. The solver stays a candidate ranker, which also means every suggestion is legal in hard mode.
How the logic solvers search
Queens places one crown per row, trying columns left to right and rejecting any that share a column or region with a placed crown or touch the previous row's crown diagonally; it backtracks when a row has no legal cell. Tango fills empty cells in reading order, trying sun then moon, and checks the two affected lines and every constraint after each placement. Zip walks from the first number, extending the path to any unvisited neighbour not blocked by a wall, enforcing the numbered order as it passes each numbered cell, and accepting only when every cell is visited and the last number reached. All three are exhaustive, so 'no solution' means the entered board has none.
Reader questions, second round
"Why does the Zip solver sometimes take a moment?" Few numbers on a big board means many possible paths; it's searching them all.
"Can I share a solved board?" The share buttons under each result post a link; the board itself isn't encoded in it.
"Do the solvers work offline?" Once a page and its word list have loaded, yes.
A word on the Connections helper's limits
The helper compares the sixteen entries with each other — shared beginnings and endings, words inside other words on the board, anagram pairs, add-a-letter pairs — so it can only see tricks that show in the letters on the board. It is silent on groups built from meaning or from a missing word: CORN, PRAIRIE, SALTY and TOP before DOG on 2 September 2026, or the hidden SKILL in CATSKILL. It also splits multi-word entries at spaces, so join them before pasting. On the 41 boards from 1 September to 11 October 2026, one of its checks covered three or more purple words on one board as pasted and on four once spaces were removed. When it lights nothing up, read the board for meaning, and if you're still stuck, the hint page stages the nudge you need.
Privacy, restated
Because solvers are the part of a puzzle site most likely to collect data — every board you enter is, after all, a puzzle someone else might want — it's worth saying again in plain terms: nothing you type into any HintSheet solver leaves your browser. The word lists are static files; the logic runs on your device; there is no request made with your input. The only network activity is loading the page and, for the word solvers, the word-list file — for the Bee solver, the file for your centre letter. That is verifiable in any browser's network panel, and the privacy policy commits to it.
Requests and roadmap
Solvers get built when a game has a board that people genuinely need help entering — which is why Queens, Tango and Zip exist and Pinpoint doesn't. Requests through the contact page are logged. Possible next steps include a Mini Sudoku solver and a Patches solver. A screenshot reader for Queens boards is the most obvious request and the least likely soon; painting the regions by hand takes a minute, and a reader that gets one cell wrong is worse than none.
Keyboard and screen-reader use
The text inputs and buttons — the Wordle guess box and tile-colour buttons, the Spelling Bee letter boxes, the size menus, mode switches and Solve buttons — work from the keyboard, and the tile-colour buttons and board cells carry text labels for screen readers. The board grids themselves (painting Queens regions, setting Tango cells, placing Zip numbers and walls) currently need a tap or click; they are not yet operable from the keyboard. That is a gap, and if it blocks you, the contact page reaches the editor: accessibility bugs are treated as corrections, not feature requests.
Why there's no account and no history
A solver that remembered your boards would need to store them somewhere, and storing them is the thing this site has promised not to do. So there is no login, no saved history and no cross-device sync. If you want to keep a board, the share link carries the page, not the board — screenshot it. The trade-off is deliberate: the solvers are small, fast, private tools, and the moment they became a product with accounts they would stop being any of those.
Frequently asked questions
Are the solvers free?
Yes. No account, no limits.
Is anything I enter uploaded?
No. Every solver runs in your browser.
Why does the Wordle solver list a word I've never heard of?
Its list is a broad public-domain dictionary of 15,910 five-letter words, sorted by common letters rather than by how likely the Times is to pick a word. Prefer the everyday word when two are close.
Does the Queens solver work on any size?
It offers every size from 5×5 to 11×11, which covers the 7×7 to 9×9 boards in HintSheet's Queens archive with room to spare.