Word Ladder Solver

The solver uses a breadth-first search across the word graph for the length you chose. It explores all valid one-letter changes from the start word outward until it reaches the end word, which guarantees the path found is the shortest possible.

Three, four, and five letters. Both words have to be the same length, which is why the length selector sets the size of both boxes. Six letters and up are not offered, and the reason is measurable rather than a matter of taste. We built the six and seven letter lists from the same source and measured them the same way as the answer further down: in a six letter list of about 8,100 words, more than a quarter of the words have no one-letter neighbour at all, and only around 18 percent of random pairs have any ladder between them. At seven letters that falls to roughly 5 percent. Word ladders stop working as a puzzle somewhere between five and six letters, so shipping those lengths would mostly ship dead ends.

Three and five letter ladders use SCOWL size 60, a widely used open word list that is large enough to cover everyday vocabulary while leaving out obscure entries that would make a solved ladder unreadable. You can read the full SCOWL licence on this site. We filter that list before use: words whose dominant meaning is a slur or is sexually explicit are removed, while ordinary vocabulary that a profanity filter tends to flag by mistake is kept. Four letter ladders use Poople’s own dictionary instead, for the reason in the next answer.

So that four letter results always match what the daily game accepts. Poople’s dictionary holds the four letter words that connect to POOP, which means a handful of ordinary words such as ABLE and ACRE are missing from it. That is a real limitation for general puzzles, and it is the trade for the solver never showing you a word the game would reject.

Yes. The solver collects all paths that share the minimum length and lists each one. If the number of equal-length paths exceeds twenty, it shows the first twenty and notes how many were found in total.

A word ladder is a puzzle where you transform one word into another by changing a single letter at each step, keeping a valid word at every rung. Lewis Carroll invented the concept in 1877 under the name Doublets. Poople is a daily word ladder where the target is always POOP.

Some words sit in their own corner of the graph with no one-letter neighbours at all, and some pairs sit in separate clusters that never meet. How often this happens depends heavily on length. Roughly 96 percent of random three letter pairs have a ladder, about 90 percent of four letter pairs, and about 58 percent of five letter pairs. So a failed five letter search is normal rather than a sign something is broken, and changing one of the two words usually finds a route. Those figures are our own: we split each of the word lists on this page into connected groups, then summed the square of each group’s share of the list, which gives the chance that two words picked at random land in the same group.

When you are stuck on a puzzle, the solver shows the shortest path from where you are so you can get moving again without guessing blindly. It also helps you learn the bridge words that turn up in many shortest paths.

A solver that stops at the first shortest route it finds will hand you one ladder. This word ladder solver keeps going and collects every ladder that ties for the shortest length, then lists them all, so you can pick the wording you like rather than taking whatever came out first. It also covers three and five letter puzzles instead of a single length, and it names the word list behind each length rather than leaving you to guess why a word was rejected.