Wordle

Wordle is the word puzzle that took the world by storm. Every day a new five-letter word is waiting to be discovered, and you have just six attempts to find it. Each guess gives you colour-coded feedback that gradually narrows down the answer, making it a satisfying blend of vocabulary, logic, and deduction.

How to Use the Wordle Game

1. Type any valid five-letter word as your first guess and press Enter.
2. Each letter in your guess is highlighted: green means the letter is correct and in the right position; yellow means the letter is in the word but in the wrong position; grey means the letter does not appear in the word at all.
3. Use the feedback to choose your next guess, eliminating impossible letters and building on confirmed ones.
4. Continue guessing until you find the word or exhaust all six attempts.
5. Share your result (the emoji grid) or try the next puzzle when the daily word refreshes.

How the Game Works

Wordle uses a fixed word list of common five-letter English words as possible answers. Each day's answer is selected from this list. The game uses a straightforward pattern-matching system for feedback: for each position in your guess, the letter is compared to the answer. Green (correct position) is assigned first. Yellow (wrong position but present in the word) is assigned only if the letter appears in the answer in a different position and has not already been accounted for by a green tile. Grey means the letter does not appear in the remaining unmatched positions in the word.

This means if the answer is APPLE and you guess PAPAL, the first P is green (correct position), the A is yellow (appears in the word but not position 2), the second P is grey (only one more P remains in the answer, already accounted for), the A is yellow (position 4, not the correct position for A), and L is yellow (appears in the word but not position 5).

Tips for Winning

• Start with a strong opening word that contains five common, distinct letters. Popular choices include CRANE, AUDIO, STARE, and RAISE, which together cover the most frequently occurring letters in English words (S, T, R, A, E, I, O, N).
• Never repeat grey letters. Once a letter is confirmed absent, every subsequent guess using that letter wastes a slot.
• Use yellow letters in different positions. If E is yellow in position 2, the word contains E but not in position 2; try it in every other position across your remaining guesses.
• In the final two guesses, prioritise words that could be the answer rather than using guesses purely for information, unless you have multiple possible answers remaining.

Wordle Strategy Across Difficulty Levels

Normal mode allows you to guess any valid word even if it contradicts previous feedback, which is useful for gathering information quickly. Hard mode requires that all revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses, which is more challenging but sometimes forces more disciplined strategy. Information theory approaches (used by bots that consistently solve Wordle in 3.4 guesses on average) calculate the word that eliminates the most possible answers from the remaining list, starting with SALET or CRANE as mathematically optimal openers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some valid words get rejected as guesses? The game uses two separate lists: a shorter list of common words that can be answers, and a longer list of valid guesses that includes rarer or more obscure words. Only words from the valid guess list are accepted. Very unusual words, proper nouns, abbreviations, and words with apostrophes are not accepted.

Can the answer be a plural or a past tense word? Yes. The answer can be any valid common five-letter word, including plurals (e.g., DOORS), past tenses (e.g., HOPED), and present participles (e.g., GOING). This is why guessing common inflections of likely base words is sometimes a useful strategy.

What does it mean when a letter appears twice in a guess? The game handles repeated letters carefully. If the answer has only one of a given letter and your guess contains two of that letter, at most one of the two will be highlighted yellow or green. The game will not indicate a repeated letter in yellow if that letter has already been fully accounted for in the answer by green tiles. Pay close attention to these signals when building later guesses.

Is there a time limit per guess? No. You can take as long as you like on each guess. There is also no penalty for incorrect guesses beyond the limit of six total attempts. Take your time, think through the possibilities systematically, and use the keyboard display (which reflects all previous feedback) to avoid accidentally re-using eliminated letters.

Scoring one guess, pass by pass

The feedback rule runs two passes over the guess, and one pair of words shows both at work. Take APPLE as the answer and ALPHA as the guess.

Pass one marks every position where the guess letter matches the answer letter in the same place. A sits at position 1 in both words, so position 1 is green. P sits at position 3 in both words, so position 3 is green. Positions 2, 4 and 5 are held back.

Pass two walks the held-back positions in order and uses up the answer letters that pass one left spare. The spare answer letters are P at position 2, L at position 4 and E at position 5. The guess holds L at position 2, H at position 4 and A at position 5. The L matches the spare L, so position 2 is yellow and that L is spent. The H matches nothing left in the answer, so position 4 is grey. The A matches the answer's A, and that A was used by the green at position 1, so position 5 is grey as well.

The row reads green, yellow, green, grey, grey. The order of the passes is what makes the closing A grey rather than yellow, and it is why a repeated letter in a guess can produce only one coloured tile.

The printed APPLE and PAPAL pair, checked

The example in the section above uses the same answer with a different guess, PAPAL, and three of its five tiles do not follow from the rule.

The printed row reads green, yellow, grey, yellow, yellow. Run the two passes and the row reads yellow, yellow, green, grey, yellow. The order of the passes puts the green at position 3 and leaves the first A grey, so the printed text reads the tiles with the passes the other way around.

The pair also cannot be reproduced on the game behind this page. PAPAL is not in the word list the puzzle carries, as the next section sets out, so the two words cannot be played against each other here.

The word list behind this puzzle

The game on this page carries its own list rather than the published one. Counted from the component, the list holds 740 five-letter words. The answer is drawn at random from that list when a game starts and again when Play again is pressed, so the puzzle is not a daily word with a fixed answer, and the same answer can come up twice in a row. A guess is checked for length only, which means any five letters are accepted even where they spell nothing, and the two-list rule in the FAQ does not describe this build. Plurals and past tenses named in the FAQ are absent from the carried list: DOORS and HOPED are not in it, while GOING is.

The published figures for the original game come from the lists in its source code, which carried 2,315 answers and a further 10,657 accepted guesses, 12,972 in all. Against those numbers the arithmetic of the puzzle is easy to state. There are 11,881,376 five-letter strings, which is 26 to the fifth power, and a guess can return any of 243 patterns, since five positions each take one of three tiles. Six guesses give a solver 64 even splits at best, which is where a well-played bot lands near the 3.4 guesses the strategy section quotes.

Reading the keyboard after a guess

The tile colours on the keyboard follow the best state a letter has reached, in the order green, then yellow, then grey. A letter marked green stays green whatever later guesses do with it. A letter marked yellow can be turned green if a later guess places it correctly. A letter marked grey stays grey.

The grey tile is the one to act on. It is a statement about the answer as well as about the guess, so a grey letter can be dropped from every later guess without losing information. The yellow tile makes a weaker claim: the letter belongs in the word, in a position other than the one already tried. Repeating a yellow letter in the same position returns the same yellow tile, and one more guess is gone.

The grid holds six rows of five. Pressing Enter with fewer than five letters shakes the current row and does not submit the guess, and the game ends on the sixth row whether or not the answer has been found.

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