I was able to stay away from socially hyped Wordle for a long time, but recently started to take a look at it. Despite my hesitation it is a great game and I really like it.

If it weren’t for my limited english skills and a profound lack of vocabulary. Just to come up with any 5-letter word was a challenging task, not to speak of finding THE right word.

So I set out to search for sites showing lists of words, which there are many around. Unfortunately none of those lists provided all the features I wanted for filtering: get me all words with an “A” on second position and a “Y” anywhere but not on position 2+3.

A long list of words and a need for filtering? That sounded like a perfect opportunity to build an APEX application to help me there.

At first I needed a freely available list of english words. With a bit of searching I found one on GitHub, but later on added another one from this site.

Using APEX it was super easy to create a new app based on the word-list-text-file, just following the Wizard when creating a new application based on a file.

Actually I didn’t use the app really, because I decided to create a new table holding only the 5-letter-words for easier and more performant searches.

Now I was able to create a report with some filters based on this new table.

The report is based on a function returning a SQL query. In this function a WHERE clause is dynamically built up based on the filters and checkboxes.

Done! It worked and helped a lot finding the right words. Just the fact that it looked ugly made me putting some more time into it.

With Theme Roller I was able to change the app colors to the ones Wordle uses. And with some extra CSS I was able to style the input fields and checkboxes to a more Wordle-worthy look.

Like the name?
Using this tool is a bit like cheating and killing the fun in Wordle, as it gets too easy. Hence: MURDLE

Note: this is meant to be used on larger displays, won’t work nicely on phones.

Oh, you want to try it out? Here is the link to run MURDLE.