Wordle is a daily word puzzle from The New York Times. You get six tries to find a hidden five-letter word, and the game tells you after each try how close you were. It takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to stop being annoyed by words like PEEVE.
The rules
- You have six guesses to find the word.
- Each guess must be a real five-letter word. You can't type random letters to test them.
- After each guess, every letter changes colour to show how close it is.
- There is one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, and it changes at midnight in your time zone.
That's the whole game. There is no timer, and you can leave and come back as often as you like.
What the colours mean
- AGreen: right letter, right spot. Keep it there.
- AYellow: the letter is in the word, but somewhere else. Move it.
- AGrey: the letter isn't in the word. Stop using it.
A game, guess by guess
Here's a real-style game where the answer is FLASH.
- WORDS: only S is yellow. So the word contains S, but not in the last spot, and has no W, O, R or D.
- SLUNG: L is green in second place and S is yellow again, so S isn't first either. U, N and G are out.
- FLASK: four greens. We know F L A S _ and only the last letter is missing.
- FLASH: solved in four.
Notice how each guess used everything learned before it. That habit matters more than any clever first word.
Repeated letters
Answers can repeat letters, like SPEED or LLAMA. When you guess a word with a repeated letter, each copy gets its own colour. If you guess EERIE and the answer has one E, only one of your Es lights up; the others turn grey. A grey copy doesn't mean the letter is absent, only that there aren't that many of it.
Your first week
- Pick one starting word and use it every day. Our tested list of starting words shows which are strongest.
- If you get stuck, take one small hint rather than the answer. The Wordle hint page lets you choose exactly how much to reveal.
- When you're ready to improve, read our Wordle strategy guide.