Wordle: Six Tries for a Five-Letter Word

Start Wordle in three steps

1. Open the official Wordle and submit a valid five-letter word.
2. Read the green, yellow, and gray tiles before choosing the next guess.
3. Repeat until you find the word or use all six tries.

What Wordle asks you to do

Open the official game and type a real five-letter word. Each box holds one letter, from left to right, and the guess counts only after you press Enter. A row that stays blank was not accepted: either you have not submitted it, or the game does not recognize that string as a word. You cannot test random letter soup. The dictionary of allowed guesses is wider than the list of possible answers, so a word can be legal to type and still never be the solution.

The New York Times Help Center describes Wordle as a daily word game with six attempts at a five-letter word. Editors curate the answers with the Oxford Dictionary. A new puzzle is released at midnight in your own timezone, which means the change follows your local date rather than one worldwide clock. Players sharing that local date are solving the same word. CasualAtlas links to the publisher and does not host a copy of the board.

How to read green, yellow, and gray

After a valid guess, each tile takes a color. Green means that letter is in the daily word and already in the correct position. Yellow means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. Gray, in the publisher’s short guide, means the letter is not in the daily word. Use the whole row together. A single green tile is a fixed point; the yellows are letters you still have to place; the grays are letters you can stop spending guesses on, with one important exception.

The exception is a repeated letter. Wordle confirms only as many copies as the answer contains. If you guess a word with two of the same letter and the answer has just one, the extra copy can turn gray even while the other copy is green or yellow. In that case gray means “no further copy,” not “this letter is impossible.” Read the row as a set of counts. The on-screen keyboard also remembers the strongest result you have seen for each letter, which saves you from scanning all six rows before every guess.

Choosing a guess that teaches you something

Early on, a useful guess is one you can learn from, not a rare word you hope is correct. Distinct, common letters cover more of the alphabet than a word that repeats a letter or leans on an unusual consonant. Once you have a green or two, stop playing a generic opener. Build a word that keeps the confirmed letters and tries to place the yellow ones. If several shapes still fit, prefer the guess that would look different under each of those shapes, so the next row eliminates more than one idea.

Leave yourself a spare guess when the board gets narrow. Five letters can still hide two or three familiar words that share the same pattern, and the last try is a poor moment to discover that you never tested the deciding letter. Say the candidates out loud and compare them position by position. The goal is not a clever score. It is to walk into the final guess already knowing why the other options failed.

What hard mode changes

Hard mode is optional. The settings cog on the official game turns it on, and the Help Center states that any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. In practice, a green letter stays in the position you already found, and a yellow letter has to appear somewhere in the next word. Guesses that ignore a confirmed letter are rejected. The puzzle is the same as in the default mode. Only your freedom to probe with unrelated words is smaller.

That restriction is why hard mode can feel stricter even though it sometimes produces a tidy solve. A word that would reveal a new vowel may be illegal if it drops a yellow letter you are not ready to place. If you are still learning the colors, play the default mode and use the information freely. Turn on hard mode when you want the extra constraint, not because a guide told you it is the proper way to play. High-contrast mode, in the same settings menu, is there if the standard green and yellow are hard to tell apart.

What the answer is allowed to be

The published rules narrow the answer list in ways that are easy to forget mid-guess. Simple plurals made by adding S or ES, without changing the root spelling, are not answers: the Help Center gives DATES and BOXES as examples of words that cannot be solutions, and GEESE as a plural that can, because the spelling itself changes. Simple past tenses made by adding ED are out as well. HOPED cannot be an answer; FRIED and SPENT can. Those examples explain the rule. They are not hints about the live puzzle.

You may still type many of those excluded shapes if the game accepts them as guesses. They can be handy for testing a letter. They are just unlikely, or in these cases ineligible, to be the word you are hunting. Treat the pattern as a filter near the end: if two candidates remain and one is a plain plural or a plain -ED verb, the other shape deserves the earlier look. The editor’s list also changes slowly over time, so an old blog post about “words Wordle will never use” is weaker evidence than the current Help Center.

Where to play, and what is free

The daily puzzle is on the web at nytimes.com/games/wordle, and the Help Center also lists the New York Times Games app and the News app. You do not need a subscription to play that daily word. An account is optional. If you are logged in, statistics can follow you between devices: games played, win percentage, current streak, and max streak. A streak counts only when you solve the puzzle released that day, before midnight local time. Finishing after midnight starts the count over.

Some extras are for subscribers. The Help Center says the full archive, Wordle Bot, and the wider Games experience are available to Games, All Access, and Home Delivery subscribers. Archive play can affect your win statistics and does not repair a daily streak. Subscribers can also create a custom puzzle of four to seven letters to send to someone else; anyone with the link can try it. None of that changes the free daily game. If a page asks you to pay before you have even seen today’s board, you are not on the standard daily Wordle.

What Wordle Hint does, and what it does not

CasualAtlas publishes Wordle Hint, a free Chrome extension, and the recommendation on this page is the place to add it. On the official Wordle page it can live-sync the tiles you have already played and rank the words that still agree with those colors. You can also enter a board by hand. The list is a suggestion drawn from your own clues. It is not The New York Times releasing the answer early, and nothing on CasualAtlas states the word for the current day.

The extension collects no data. It has no account, no analytics, and it does not send your guesses anywhere. Preferences, such as whether the panel is open, stay in the browser’s local storage. Wordle Hint is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The New York Times Company. If you would rather solve with no ranking at all, ignore the block and use the publisher link. The game is complete without it.

Wordle beside the other word games here

Wordle is the letter-color puzzle. The neighbors on CasualAtlas ask for different kinds of attention. Contexto ranks guesses by meaning, so spelling is almost irrelevant. Betweenle places each guess in alphabetical order and asks you to shrink the gap. Blossom gives you seven letters and only twelve words to spend them on. Sedecordle deals one guess across sixteen boards at once, with a shared budget of twenty-one. If the single five-letter grid feels familiar, one of those is the change of pace.

None of them replaces the official Wordle, and none of them is a place to look up its answer. Use this guide for the rules, then play on the publisher’s site. When you want the result explained to a friend, the share button copies a spoiler-free grid of colored squares, not the word itself. That grid is the whole social trick: someone else can see how many tries it took without having the puzzle ruined.

Try Contexto for meaning, Betweenle for alphabetical order, Blossom for twelve chosen words, or Sedecordle for sixteen boards.

Wordle questions, answered