Betweenle solver & hints

Here the solver plays a full game against the hidden word PLANT, starting with both fields empty and always taking its own suggestion. Each row shows the range at that point, how many common words were in it, the suggested guess, and what the game would answer.

It took 9 guesses. Notice how the count falls by about half each row, and how the two bounds start sharing letters: once both start with the same letters, so does the answer.

Using it during a game

1. Play any five-letter word in Betweenle. The game places it above the secret word if the secret comes later in the alphabet, or below it if the secret comes earlier.
2. Type the word directly above the gap in After and the word directly below it in Before. If you mix them up, the solver swaps them for you.
3. Play the suggested word, then update the field it replaces. Repeat until you hit the answer.

Why halving works

Betweenle is a binary search. Our list has 2,817 common five-letter words. Halving the range each turn finds any of them in about 12 guesses, well inside the 14 guesses the daily game gives you. A guess near one end of the range is a gamble: if you are wrong, you may only remove a few words.

The solver sorts the common words alphabetically, keeps the ones strictly between your two words (your bounds are never suggested, since the game has already ruled them out), and looks at the middle of what is left. Instead of the exact middle word, which can be obscure, it takes the most familiar word within 5% of the middle on either side. That costs almost nothing in range-cutting and gives you a word the game is sure to accept.

Shared letters

Any letters your two bounds share at the start are locked in for the answer. If the range is MAGIC to MOTOR, the answer starts with M. Betweenle shows these as revealed letters too. When the shared start grows to three or four letters, read the word list below the suggestion: often only a handful of real words fit.

Common and rare words

Daily answers are everyday words, so the suggestion and the list come from the common part of our dictionary. The note under the suggestion also counts rare words in the range. If the common list runs out but rare words remain, the answer may be an unusual word, or one of your bounds may be mistyped. The full dictionary is the public-domain ENABLE list (172,823 words), which is close to, but not the same as, the word list Betweenle uses.

What it does not use

Betweenle also shows a marker hinting whether the answer is closer to the top or the bottom word. The solver ignores it and always cuts the range in the middle. If you trust the marker, pick a word from the list on that side of the suggestion instead.

Good opening guesses

These words split the common five-letter words into fifths, so the first two or three guesses quickly land you in the right part of the dictionary:

• board
• first
• local
• river
• times

Start with the middle one (LOCAL), then the one on the side the game sends you.