Wordle Same Letter Twice Rules Explained: How Does it Work?

The latest buzz on the fun side of the internet is all about the amusing online word game, Wordle. It gives you 6 attempts to guess ‘the word of the day,’ and it has unique indicators that cue the player to rearrange the words to find the right order.

Wordle is a daily challenge that gives hints using colors as stimuli. When an input letter is a part of the word, it is highlighted in yellow color. If the letter is in the right position as well, the letter gets highlighted in green. Finally, if the letter you input is wrong, it is highlighted in grey.

With such an interesting color paradigm going on, does Wordle follow any criteria for selecting the word of the day? Do words with repeating letters also appear in the challenge? Here’s everything we’ve found out!

Can Letters Repeat in Wordle?

Yes, the words in the daily challenge may have repeated letters. The only unbreakable rules of Wordle words are 1) the words can only have 5 letters, and 2) they ought to be real words. You can not input a made-up word like “blout” and expect the game to accept it.

But, words with a certain letter repeated twice are not unheard of in the Wordle challenge universe. In fact, repeated letters are not too rare in Wordle world as we have seen players sharing on social media about clearing words like “Abbey” and “Banal.”

Can Wordle Use Same Letter Twice?

Words with repeated letters may have any combination and pattern. For instance, the word “bookkeeper” has three letters that repeat in pairs three times. There can be other combinations like the non-consecutive repetition of “t” and “a” in “tantalizing”, or alternating repetition of “e”,”i” and “t” in the word “repetition.”

However, in the Wordle world, the words have a character restriction of 5. Hence, the repeated letters usually appear consecutively like the letter “b” in the word “Abbey” or non-consecutively like “a” in the word “Banal.” In fact, the most recent Wordle challenge is another word that has a letter repeated non-consecutively(Can’t reveal, because, nobody likes Spoilers, right?)

For players looking for a strategy, repeating letters are a good way to make the progressing moves (repeated letters are not the best first moves, though.) As five letter words, the repeating letter combinations tend to be double letters like “ss” (eg: floss, glass), “nn” (eg: funny, sunny), “ll” (Fills, kills), “pp” (eg: happy, soppy), “ff” (eg: bluff, staff), “bb” (eg: abbot, hobby), “o” (eg: blood, bloom), “d” (added, buddy”), etc.

Another possible direction to take your guesswork is to think of double letters in the middle like “fully”, “paddy” or at the end like “three”, “dress”, “still,” etc. Of course, we can not forget the alternating or non-consecutive repetitions of a,e,i,o,u (eg: abate, eager, filip, ovoid, augur, etc.)

Wordle rules for ‘Same Letter Used Twice’: All you need to know

We have established that Wordle words may have repeated letters. Does Wordle give any special hints to the players if a repeated letter is input in any of the five boxes in a row? After playing a couple of Wordle repeated word challenges, we have found out that repeated letters are treated just like any other letter in the game.

To demonstrate, let’s study a screenshot of the “ABBEY” Wordle. The “B” placed in the right “middle” position is highlighted in “green” following the rules like the “B”s in yellow indicating their wrong letter position.

So, what if you repeat a letter more times than it actually appears in the word? Will the repeated letter be highlighted in yellow regardless?

No, Wordle is very strict and fair with its letters. If you repeat a letter more than it appears, then the excess will be highlighted in grey. For instance, we can see below that when the player entered double “E” in a guessed word, one of them was highlighted in yellow while the other was in grey, meaning there is indeed and only one “E” in the word. Since the first “E” in the double letter pair got highlighted in yellow, it also means that neither of them is in the right position. In short, in the case of all the repeated letters being in the wrong position, the first one(s) would get a yellow highlight, and the excess repeated letter(s) would get grey highlights.

In Wordle, letters may be repeated in any order as many times as it can be done, however, the Wordle rules don’t show them any special favor, but treat them as isolated characters. It makes the game more interesting as it really challenges you to identify the word by your own effort rather than depending on system-designed hints.