Letter Boxed Solver

How Letter Boxed works

Letter Boxed is a daily puzzle built around a single square. You get nine letters arranged in a 3×3 grid and you have to find as many words as you can that are made only from those nine letters. The grid is the entire alphabet you are allowed to use. If there is no R on the board, no word you write down can contain an R, no matter how well it fits the theme you think the puzzle is aiming at.

The 3×3 grid

The nine letters are the puzzle. There is no letter bank you can draw from and no letters hidden behind the squares. Every word you find has to be spelled entirely from the nine squares on the board in front of you. This is the single idea that separates Letter Boxed from most other word games on this site, and it is why the grid shape matters as much as the letters themselves.

The layout is a 3×3 square rather than a line because a square is easier to scan in a corner of a page or a phone screen. It also puts a hard limit on the interesting case: a seven-letter word needs seven of the nine squares, so it can only leave two squares unused. That constraint is what makes bingos feel like an achievement rather than a lucky accident.

Valid words and the no-reuse rule

Two conditions decide whether a word is a legal find. First, every letter in the word has to appear somewhere on the grid. Second, and this is the part people forget, a square can only be used once within a single word. If you want to spell a word that needs two of the same letter, you need two squares holding that letter.

So on a grid reading A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, the word BAIT is legal if it uses four different squares. The word APPLE is not, because the grid has one P and APPLE needs two. Across different words you may of course reuse the same squares as often as you like; the restriction applies only inside one word.

What happens when a letter repeats

Grids regularly contain a repeated letter, and this is the rule that trips people up most often. If the grid holds two A's, then a word may use two A's. If the grid holds three E's, a word may use three E's. The rule is not "no letter may repeat", it is "no square may repeat". Squares and letters are not the same thing, and a grid with two E's genuinely opens up a family of words that a single-E grid cannot reach.

It also works in the other direction. On a grid with two A's and one C, the word CACA is perfectly legal: two A squares and one C square, three squares used, no square used twice. The solver on this page handles this by counting how many copies of each letter the grid holds and then rejecting any word that asks for more copies than that.

What counts as a word

Beyond the grid rules, a find has to be a word in ordinary English. Plural forms, past tenses, comparative forms, and common inflections are all fair game. Abbreviations, proper nouns, and invented strings are not, and a solver that returns them will get you a rejected entry in a real game.

This page runs on the same 267,751-word English dictionary that powers the other solvers here, which is a broad list: it carries inflections, archaic spellings, and borrowed vocabulary alongside everyday words. If you want a completely different kind of check on your letters, the Scrabble solver works from a tournament word list instead, which is stricter about what counts as playable. The five-letter word list is the useful companion when a grid forces you down to a single length.

The rules, written out precisely

Here is the whole puzzle in one place, with nothing left to infer. Read it once and the grid stops being mysterious.

1. You are given nine letters in a 3×3 square.
2. A valid word uses only letters that appear on the grid.
3. Within a single word, no square on the grid may be used twice.
4. If the grid shows the same letter twice, a word may use that letter twice, and no more times than the grid shows it.
5. Words of three letters or more are valid finds. Two-letter words are not.
6. You score more for longer words, and a seven-letter word or longer is a bingo.
7. You may reuse the same squares across different words without limit.

The five conditions a word must satisfy

Condition two is the one that removes most of English from consideration. Condition three removes more. Condition four turns both of those into something you can actually calculate, because it converts a positional constraint into a counting constraint. Once you have counts rather than positions, the question becomes: does this word need more copies of any letter than the grid holds? If the answer is no for every letter in the word, the word is legal and there is always a way to trace it.

That last part is worth pausing on, because it is the reason a solver can give you a trace and be right every time. Because the rule is about squares rather than about arrangements, any word whose letter counts fit the grid can be traced on the grid, and the trace exists. You are never choosing between different placements of the same word for scoring purposes; you just need one valid route.

How scoring and bingos fit together

Longer words score more, and the scoring bands make the middle of the range the most productive. Three- and four-letter words are the entry fee: they are easy to find and they are worth the least. Five- and six-letter words are where a good run separates itself from a mediocre one. Seven letters and above is the bingo band, worth a jump that is out of proportion to the extra effort.

This creates a real tension in how you spend your time. Hunting a seven-letter word might take five minutes and pay more than a dozen three-letter words. But if you cannot find the seven-letter word at all, those three-letter words are the score you actually get. Good players learn to work the short bands first, quickly, then move up.

What the puzzle does not require

There is no theme in Letter Boxed. There is no category, no definition, and no set of answers that share a meaning. The grid is the entire constraint, which is unusual among daily word puzzles and is why the puzzle rewards breadth of vocabulary rather than knowledge of a subject.

There is also no limit on how many words you may find from the same grid, and no penalty for a word that is technically valid but obscure. In practice, players share the words they found, and a shared list is often longer than any single player produced alone.

What a bingo is

In Letter Boxed, a bingo is a valid word of seven letters or more. That is the whole definition. The word comes from the game of bingo, where a single number completing a line was called a bingo, and the same word stuck here to describe the moment a grid produces a find long enough to be remarkable.

Why the seven-letter threshold

Seven is not arbitrary in practice, it is a natural consequence of the board. A 3×3 grid holds nine squares. A seven-letter word uses seven of them, so exactly two squares go unused. An eight-letter word uses eight and leaves one. Nine would use the entire grid, and nine-letter finds do exist, but they are rare enough that most grids never produce one.

There is also a practical threshold. Short words are almost free: given a grid with common letters, a three- or four-letter word is usually only a moment's thought. By the time you are looking for seven letters without repeating a square, you are genuinely working. The puzzle marks that band with a name because it is where the skill shows.

Why a seven-letter word is worth chasing

Beyond the points, a bingo is worth chasing because it is almost impossible to duplicate by accident. If two people are looking at the same grid, both of them will find BED, TEASE and CHART. Finding a seven-letter word usually means one person saw a route the other did not, and it gives you a word to contribute that the rest of the group does not have.

It is also the most satisfying thing in the puzzle. A run of twenty three-letter words feels like work; a run of twenty words that includes one seven-letter find feels like a good grid. If you only have time to chase one thing on a hard grid, chase the long word.

How bingos change how you read a grid

Once you decide to hunt for a bingo, you stop reading the grid as a bag of letters and start reading it as a set of routes. You are looking for a long path through seven squares, not a word that happens to fit. Practically, that means you look for a letter that can start a long word and a letter that can end one, and you try to join them.

It also changes your tolerance for rare vocabulary. A seven-letter find almost always involves an uncommon word, an uncommon suffix, or both. Players who want bingos need to be comfortable with words that would look strange on their own. This is one place where a solver genuinely helps, because it will show you the CABRISH and the PALOVERE that your own vocabulary never reaches.

Strategy: working a grid efficiently

The order in which you attack a grid matters more than the raw speed of your vocabulary. A structured pass finds more in less time than a free-form scan, because a free-form scan tends to find the same four-letter words over and over while skipping the long band entirely.

Count the vowels before you count anything else

Vowel availability is the single most informative thing about a Letter Boxed grid, because English words need vowels and most Letter Boxed grids have between two and five of them. Three vowels spread across the grid means a comfortable board. One vowel means every word you find has to share that vowel, and you should start there. Zero vowels means the grid is nearly dead, and your realistic target is a short consonant cluster.

Two vowels is the most common situation and the hardest to play well, because you have to decide whether to spend a vowel on a short word or save it for a long one. The right answer depends on how good the consonants are, which is the next question.

Anchor on the rare letter

Every grid has at least one letter that limits your options: J, Q, X and Z are the usual culprits, but even a grid with two F's or three T's constrains you. Start from that letter rather than ending at it. Words that use a rare letter are fewer, so you will find them faster, and they tend to be the long ones.

This is also why the shape of the grid matters more than it first appears. If the rare letter sits in a corner, it has fewer neighbours, which means fewer letters can sit next to it in a word, which means fewer words use it at all. A rare letter in the centre of the grid can reach all eight squares around it. Before you dismiss a grid because of its Q, check where the Q is sitting.

Start from the doubled letter

When a grid contains two of the same letter, that pair is the most productive feature on the board. Doubled letters open up a whole family of words that a single copy cannot reach: the double L in CATTLE, the double O in SPOON, the double T in BUTTER, the double S in CLASS. Start from the pair and work outward.

It is also the fastest way to find bingos, because the words that use a doubled letter are usually longer than the words that do not. Nobody doubles a letter in a three-letter word except to make ABB, ADD or EGG. By the time a word needs two E's, it is usually six letters or more.

Work the length bands in order

A reliable pass goes short to long. Find the three- and four-letter words first because they are quick and they confirm your grid reading. Then move to five and six, where the real points are. Then, if the grid allows it, hunt for the seven- and eight-letter finds. The five-letter word list is a good companion for that middle band, because a grid that only supports five-letter words is a grid that rewards a specific kind of thinking rather than a general one.

Working short to long also protects you against the classic mistake of spending twenty minutes chasing one seven-letter word, missing it, and going home with three three-letter finds. Bank the short band first, then chase.

Hunt the endings

English runs out of endings long before it runs out of words, and the endings that pay best in Letter Boxed are the ones that add two letters to a stem you already have. If you can spot an ED, ER, ING, ES or LY, look for the stem and try to extend it. Two 4-letter stems can become two 6-letter words, and 6-letter words are worth more than 4-letter ones.

This is why many good Letter Boxed players think in stems rather than in whole words. The grid has an E and a D. Find every word that ends in a stem you can finish with ED. Find every word that ends in a stem you can finish with ER. The overlap between those two sets is usually where the long finds live.

Use the shape of the grid, not just the letters

Letters tell you what is possible; positions tell you what is likely. A grid where the vowels are all in one row or one column produces words that run in a single direction, because a word that snakes around needs vowels scattered through the middle of the route. A grid with vowels spread evenly gives you far more routing freedom, and that freedom is worth several extra words.

So before you give up on a grid, check whether it is really the letters or just the arrangement. A grid of R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z looks dead, but the Z and the Y give you a route and the X gives you a rare-letter anchor. There is usually a playable word in there even when the vowels are stingy.

Common traps

Almost every mistake in Letter Boxed comes back to one of a handful of specific errors. Knowing them by name makes them much easier to catch in yourself.

Reusing a square by accident

This is the classic error. You see E, V, E, R, Y on the grid, you want to spell EVERY, and you use the same E square twice because the two E squares are far apart in your head. The word is illegal even though every letter you need is present.

The fix is physical. Before you write an answer down, point at each square in order as you say the letter. If your finger cannot visit nine distinct squares, the word is not legal. This is the single habit that separates beginners from experienced players, and it is also exactly what the trace on this page shows you: the numbered squares, in order, with no repeats.

Forgetting that the grid has two of a letter

The opposite error. The grid holds two A's and you assume a word with two A's is illegal because you have internalised the single-A rule from other puzzles. That word is perfectly legal and you are leaving points on the table.

Read the grid as a multiset, not a set. Two identical squares are two chances. If you want to check quickly, put your finger on one square and look for the other one before you write the word down.

Missing inflections and extensions

Plurals, past tenses and comparatives are legal and they are free points. CHAIR becomes CHAIRS. AGREE becomes AGREES or AGREED. BRIGHT becomes BRIGHTER. If you have a five-letter word and the grid has an S and an E, the six-letter version is usually sitting right there.

At the other end, do not leave a word half-finished. If your first instinct was a stem, the real find is one letter longer. The word wheel solver is useful for a related job: it takes a fixed set of letters and finds every word you can build from them, which is the same underlying problem when you are working with a rack rather than a grid.

Reaching for a word nobody will accept

Abbreviations, foreign words that are not standard English, and technical terms are a risk. Some players submit them happily; others submit them and get them rejected, which can cost a whole point in a scored game. If you are playing in a group, check anything unusual against a dictionary before you claim it.

Broad dictionaries are the reason a solver can hand you a word that your app refuses. The anagram solver and the word search solver on this site run on the same dictionary, so if you want to know how a word is likely to be treated in a different format, those are the tools to compare against.

Stopping after the easy band

You found twelve four-letter words and felt finished. The grid almost certainly still had a six-letter word and possibly a seven-letter one. The sense of having exhausted a grid is unreliable, because the long band requires a different kind of thinking from the short one.

Set yourself a rule: before you stop, run one more pass looking only for words of six letters or more. That single pass is where most of the missing points are.

Solving without a computer

It is entirely possible to work a Letter Boxed grid with nothing but your head, and it is worth learning to do, because the skill transfers to every other word game on this site. Here is a method that works.

Build a letter pool in your head

Write the nine letters in a row and then write the counts underneath them, so you know at a glance that you have two A's and one C. Do not skip this step even though it feels slow. The count line is what stops you from both reusing a square and mis-reading a doubled letter, which are the two errors that cost the most.

Say the word out loud

Speaking a candidate word while pointing at squares catches far more errors than silent checking. It is easy to convince yourself that a word works when you are only picturing it. Saying it out loud in order makes you notice the moment you reach for the same square twice.

It also helps with the vague feeling that a word is right. If you can say it clearly and point to a distinct square for every letter, it is right. If you cannot, it is not, whatever it feels like.

Keep a scratch list of endings

Before hunting long words, list the two-letter endings the grid can support: ED, ER, ES, ING, LY, LE, ER, Y, S, T. Most of those endings attach to a short stem that is already on the grid. Write the stems down too, and you have a multiplication table instead of a guessing game.

Use a two-pass method

The first pass takes two minutes and finds everything short. Read the grid, list the three- and four-letter words, and stop when a second pass stops producing new ones. The second pass takes longer and looks only for six letters and up, starting from whichever of the three strategies suits the grid: rare letter, doubled letter, or a two-letter ending.

Splitting the work this way is much more reliable than trying to hold everything at once, and it naturally protects the short band before you invest time in the long one.

How Letter Boxed differs from Wordle, Strands and Connections

These four puzzles come up together constantly and they are genuinely different games, not variants of one idea. Knowing which is which makes it much easier to pick the right tool, and it explains why the solvers on this site are built differently.

Letter Boxed and Wordle

Wordle gives you a fixed answer and asks you to guess it. Letter Boxed gives you a set of letters and asks you to find every word inside it. One is a deduction game with a single right answer; the other is a generation game with a huge number of valid answers. The Wordle solver narrows a search space down to one candidate; the tool on this page expands a small set of letters into a large list.

The other big difference is feedback. Wordle tells you after every guess which letters are right and in which position. Letter Boxed tells you nothing at all. There is no feedback loop, no narrowing, and no way to tell from the board whether a word is good. That is why a solver or a written list of your own attempts is so much more useful here than it is in Wordle. If you want a daily Wordle board to practise on, the Wordle hints page keeps a running archive.

Letter Boxed and Strands

Strands hands you a grid of letters and asks you to find themed words that wander through it, with one long spangram that uses every letter exactly once. Letter Boxed asks you to find words that fit inside a much smaller grid, without a theme, and without any requirement to use everything.

The mechanics are also different in a way that matters. In Strands the position of a letter constrains which words can start near it, so adjacency is part of the puzzle. In Letter Boxed, position only matters in the sense that a letter in a corner has fewer neighbours, and even that is a soft effect rather than a hard rule. If you want to try the grid-and-theme format, the Word Path game on this site runs that format with its own daily grids.

Letter Boxed and Connections

Connections is a grouping game. You get sixteen words, sort them into four categories of four, and the puzzle rewards you for spotting the theme that links them. Letter Boxed is the opposite: you produce words rather than sorting words somebody else gave you, and the theme is absent entirely.

The tools reflect that. The Connections solver works on a fixed board of sixteen words and looks for groupings. This solver works on nine letters and looks for generation. The word games hub has the full spread of both kinds of puzzle if you want to compare them side by side.

Why a solver helps

A solver is not the same thing as cheating, and the distinction is worth being precise about. Cheating is taking an answer you did not work for. Using a tool to check and to extend your own work is a different activity, and in Letter Boxed it has a real justification: the puzzle has no feedback, so without an external list you have no way of knowing what you missed.

Checking, not cheating

The most defensible way to use this tool is to write down your own list first, and only then run the grid through the solver. The gap between the two lists is your learning data, and it is far more valuable than either list alone. If you skip straight to the solver, you get the words and you learn nothing.

A second, entirely legitimate use is the shared-list situation. In a group game, or a casual game with friends, people routinely compare lists afterwards to find words nobody had. Using a solver for that is no different from using a dictionary to check a word you are unsure about.

Learning the shape of the dictionary

Run a few grids through a solver and you start to see the shape of English under these constraints. You notice that certain letter combinations are far more productive than you expected. You notice which letters make a grid dead and which make it rich. You notice that the words you would never have thought of are clustered around particular endings.

That vocabulary of grids is the actual skill in the puzzle. The words themselves change every day; the way a grid behaves does not.

Finding the words you would never have reached

Every dictionary contains layers. The top layer is the everyday words you already know. Below that sit the words you recognise but would not have produced under pressure, like GRIEVE or THICKEN. Below that sits a layer of genuine surprises, obscure inflections and unusual compounds, and in Letter Boxed that layer is where the bingos live.

A solver does not make the long words more impressive, because you still had to trace them on the grid. It only means you get to find them. For a casual player that is a nicer way to spend a grid; for a player practising seriously, seeing the word at all is what teaches you it exists.

Letter Boxed variants

Letter Boxed is simple enough that it has spawned a lot of variations, and the tool on this page handles most of them without changing anything.

Timed rounds

The most common variation gives you a fixed amount of time, usually a few minutes, and scores you on what you found before the clock ran out. That change turns the puzzle from a generation task into a speed task, and it shifts the optimal strategy: under a clock, the short band matters more than it does in an untimed game, because a long hunt can eat the time you needed for eight cheap words.

Themed grids

Some versions give the grid a theme, or ask you to find words connected to a category. That is a different constraint layered on top of the grid rules, and it is where the honest limits of a solver become obvious: the solver finds grid-legal words, not theme-legal words, because it has no idea what theme you are supposed to be following. You still have to do the thematic half of the work yourself.

Larger grids

Some variants use a 4×4 grid, or 4×6, to allow longer words. The solver here is fixed to the standard 3×3 shape, because that is the shape the rules on this page describe, but the underlying matching rule is unchanged for a bigger board: more squares means more letters to choose from and longer words become possible.

Two-player races

In a race, two people work the same grid at the same time and the winner is whoever found more words. The strategic question changes completely. You should hunt in bands your opponent is unlikely to be working, which usually means going for long words immediately rather than sweeping the easy ones. A solver run mid-race is close to unusable, but a solver run on the grid beforehand is exactly the preparation you want.

Custom grids

Custom grids are the reason the Random grid button exists. If you want to practise on a grid that behaves like a real one, a weighted random grid is a reasonable stand-in: it draws from the letters that actually occur in English, so you get a playable board with a realistic vowel count rather than nine consonants. It is a decent warm-up before a real grid, and it is how you can test yourself against the solver without waiting for a new puzzle.

Using this tool as a learning aid

The tool is more useful when you use it in a particular way. These are the habits that turn a lookup into practice.

Read the trace, not just the list

Every entry in the results has a trace showing which squares produce that word, in order. Open it. Seeing that BRISK uses squares 4, 6, 1, 2, 8 teaches you something about routing that the word BRISK never will. It shows you that the route through a grid is not arbitrary, and it trains the habit of checking squares rather than letters.

Keep your own list first

Write your own list before you touch the solver. Then compare. The words on the solver's list that you missed are the exact set of things your vocabulary and your routing did not cover, and that set is a precise description of what to work on.

If you want a repeatable way to do this, keep a short record for each grid: the grid, the time you took, and the words you missed. Over a couple of weeks that record tells you more than any amount of general advice about strategy.

Compare against the common-words pool

The Common words only filter uses the site's curated everyday pool, which is a five-letter list of common English answers. Turn it on when you want to see the version of your grid that only everyday vocabulary can solve. That is a good proxy for how a casual player experiences the same grid, and it is a useful way to find out whether a grid is hard because of the letters or because of the vocabulary.

Switch it back off for the full picture, because the words it hides are precisely the ones that make the puzzle interesting.

Building a grid practice routine

Improvement in Letter Boxed is mostly a matter of repetition with feedback. A short, consistent routine beats an occasional long session, and it does not need much time.

Two grids a day

Two grids is enough. One to work cold, timed honestly, without the solver. One to work with the solver open, where the point is to see what you missed. Ten minutes on the first and ten on the second is a complete session.

Track what you missed

Keep a running list of the words the solver found and you did not. Do not just count them, read them. Group them by why you missed them: a word you had never seen, a word you knew but did not see a route for, a word you could not reach in the time. Each group calls for a different fix. Unknown vocabulary calls for more reading. Routing problems call for more tracing practice. Time problems call for a better pass order.

Study the doubles

Make a point of practising grids with doubled letters, because they are where the long words hide and where players are weakest. When the grid has two of a letter, actively look for words that need both copies: they are longer than average and they are what the other players will miss.

Time a round honestly

Time yourself on a handful of grids with a clock running, and do not let yourself stop early. Most of the gain in a timed game comes from learning that you can find another ten words in the last ninety seconds you were about to give up on. If you want a different format to practise in, the Squareword solver and the Codeword solver cover other grid-based formats on the same site.

Other solvers on this site

If you are moving between grids and racks all day, these are the tools that cover the rest of the formats. The Boggle solver works on a cube board with adjacency rules rather than a 3×3 grid. The Spelling Bee word list covers the seven-letter hive format with a compulsory centre letter, which is a useful contrast because its central-letter rule is exactly the constraint Letter Boxed does not have. The Wordle solver is the deduction tool for guessing games. All of them run locally in your browser with no account.