How the colors work with repeated letters in Termo

Termo team · Roghan Games · October 19, 2026

Most players know that green means “right letter, right place” and yellow means “right letter, wrong place”. The confusing part is what happens when a word has a repeated letter. The rule is simple, but it is easy to get wrong in your head, so here it is with examples. The colors below are produced by the same code that runs the game.

The rule, in order

1. First, every letter that is in the correct place becomes green, and that letter is “used up” in the answer.
2. Then, going from left to right, each remaining letter becomes yellow only if the answer still has an unused copy of it. Each yellow uses up one copy.
3. Anything left over becomes gray.

Example 1: a letter the answer has only once

Suppose the answer is AMIGO and you guess ARARA:

AMIGO has just one A, and the green A in the first slot already uses it. That is why the other two A's turn gray even though the letter exists in the word. Gray does not always mean “this letter is not in the word”; it can also mean “there are no more copies”.

Example 2: a repeated letter in the answer

Suppose the answer is SPEED, which has two E's, and you guess ERASE:

No letter is in the right place, so nothing is green. SPEED has two E's, so both E's in your guess get a yellow. The S is yellow because SPEED contains an S. This tells you the answer has two E's, which is valuable information.

What this means for your strategy

• If you see two yellows or greens for the same letter, the answer has that letter at least twice.
• If one copy is colored and another is gray, the answer has exactly as many copies as there are colored ones.
• Be careful with gray tiles: before you discard a letter, check whether it was gray only because of a repeat.
• The on-screen keyboard shows the best color each letter has had, so a key can look green even if one copy of it was gray in a guess.

Tip: when you suspect a repeated letter, guess a word that repeats it. You will learn right away whether you were right.