Wordle is a free daily word puzzle created by software engineer Josh Wardle and published by The New York Times. Each day, players have six attempts to guess a secret five-letter word. After every guess the game tells you which letters are correct, which are present but in the wrong position, and which are not in the word at all.

The game went viral in late 2021 — in part because it could only be played once a day and players could share their results as coloured emoji grids on social media without spoiling the answer. The NYT acquired it in January 2022 for a reported seven-figure sum.

Why is it so popular?

• One puzzle per day creates a shared cultural moment — everyone is solving the same word.
• The game takes under five minutes to play.
• The emoji share format spread naturally on Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
• There is no app to download, no account required, and no cost.
• The strict one-per-day limit makes each puzzle feel special.

Variants worth trying

The success of Wordle spawned hundreds of variants. Popular ones include Quordle (four words at once), Octordle (eight words), Heardle (music clips), Worldle (country shapes), and Nerdle (maths equations). The core mechanic — feedback-guided deduction — translates to almost any knowledge domain.

The objective

Guess the secret five-letter word in six attempts or fewer. Every guess must be a real, valid English word — you cannot enter random strings of letters.

Reading the colour feedback

Important rules

• Every guess must be a valid 5-letter word accepted by the game's dictionary.
• Letters can appear more than once in the answer (e.g. ABBEY, MAMMA).
• If you guess a letter twice and it only appears once in the answer, only the correct instance turns yellow or green — the other turns grey.
• You have exactly six guesses. There is no time limit.
• The answer resets at midnight in your local time zone.

Using this Wordle solver

Click the Wordle Solver tab above to use our interactive solver. Enter each letter of your guesses into the grid and click on tiles to cycle their colour between grey, yellow, and green — matching your real game. Then click Solve to see every valid five-letter word that fits your clues.

1. Start with a strong opening word

Your first guess should cover as many common letters as possible. The most frequent letters in five-letter English words are E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N, C. A strong opener uses 4–5 of these without repeating any letter. Popular first words include CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU, RAISE, and AUDIO.

2. Never waste a guess on a grey letter

Once a letter turns grey, it is not in the answer. Beginners frequently keep using grey letters out of habit or because they can't think of another word quickly. Discipline yourself: every letter in your next guess must either be new (unexplored) or a confirmed letter placed in a new position.

3. Prioritise placing yellow letters

A yellow letter tells you two things: the letter is in the word, and it's not in that position. Your next guess should include that letter but in a different column. Many beginners get yellow letters and then repeat the same position — this wastes the information the game just gave you.

4. Use a second "information" guess

After your opener, if you have few greens and yellows, consider using guess two to cover five entirely new letters rather than trying to guess the word. For example, if CRANE gave you nothing, try BOILS or THUMP to eliminate more letters quickly. This information-gathering approach wins more consistently than lucky guessing.

5. Don't panic on guess five or six

If you reach guess five with three green letters and one unknown position, you may have several possible answers. Work through what letters haven't been eliminated yet. Write them down if it helps. Stay systematic — panic leads to repeating grey letters or forgetting what you know.

1. Think about letter frequency by position

Letters don't occur equally across all five positions. In Wordle answers, S almost never appears in position 1 (but often ends words that aren't plurals), A appears frequently in positions 2 and 3, and E dominates position 5. Knowing these patterns helps you design smarter guesses. For example, guessing a word with E in position 5 tests both the letter and the most common position simultaneously.

2. The hard mode trap

Wordle's hard mode requires you to use confirmed letters in every subsequent guess. This sounds helpful but it can trap you. With three green letters and an unknown word, you may have 10+ possible answers all fitting the constraint — and you have to guess among them. In normal mode you can play a "sacrifice" word covering multiple possible answers to rule out candidates efficiently.

3. Be aware of common word patterns

Wordle answers are almost never obscure — the NYT tends to pick common everyday words. However there are patterns to watch for:

• Double letters are more common than beginners expect (ABBEY, SPEED, TROLL, CLASS).
• Words ending in -IGHT are a classic trap: LIGHT, NIGHT, MIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, FIGHT, TIGHT, EIGHT all fit _IGHT. If you get _IGHT, use a sacrifice guess to test multiple options at once.
• Words ending in -ING, -LY, -ED are common endings worth building toward.

4. Use our solver to understand your options

After playing Wordle, try entering your game into our Wordle Solver to see how many words remained valid after each guess. If the solver shows 50+ options after guess two, you'll know you needed a more information-rich guess rather than a lucky stab at the answer.

5. Practise the most common 5-letter word patterns

Roughly 80% of English five-letter words follow one of a handful of consonant-vowel patterns: CVCVC (e.g. LASER), CCVVC (e.g. CRANE), CVVCС (e.g. BROAD). Mentally categorising words this way helps you generate candidate guesses faster when you're working from partial information.

1. The mathematically optimal opener

Researchers and programmers have calculated which starting words reduce the remaining word space the most on average. Using information theory (Shannon entropy), words like SALET, CRANE, TRACE, and CRATE consistently outperform others. SALET was identified as optimal by the 3Blue1Brown analysis as it minimises expected guesses to approximately 3.42 across all NYT answers. However, the difference between the top 20 openers is minimal — consistency in subsequent guesses matters more.

2. Entropy and information gain

Each guess should maximise the information you receive, measured in bits. A guess that splits the remaining candidate pool as close to 50/50 as possible gives one bit of information — the most you can get. A guess that confirms the word directly but only fits one scenario gives zero information (you already knew). Expert players intuitively estimate which guess will eliminate the most candidates across all possible colour outcomes, not just the most hopeful outcome.

3. The two-guess optimal strategy

With unlimited time and the full word list available, you can pre-compute a decision tree. After an optimal opener like CRANE, a second "coverage" word such as STOMP orILITY is chosen not because it's likely to be right, but because it tests letters that maximally partition the remaining candidates. This two-guess setup solves most Wordles in 3–4 tries reliably, without ever playing a guess that depends on luck.

4. Know the NYT Wordle word list

The NYT Wordle answer list is a curated subset of common English words — approximately 2,300 in the original list. Notably, it excludes obscure words, most plurals (words ending in plain -S), and past tenses ending in -ED as the main answer. Understanding this curation means you can deprioritise unlikely candidates. For example, ABBEY is valid; ABBES (plural of abbess) would be extremely unusual as an answer.

5. Handling double-letter traps systematically

When you suspect a double letter (e.g. you've accounted for all positions except two and only have one unplaced yellow letter), use a sacrifice guess to test the double-letter hypothesis directly. Guess a word that puts the suspected letter in both remaining positions. This removes ambiguity in one guess rather than gambling across two.

6. The -IGHT trap and family clustering

Letter families — groups of words differing by only one letter — are the most dangerous Wordle pattern. With __IGHT or _ATCH or _OUND, you can face 6–8 valid answers. The expert move is to identify the family as early as possible, then use a sacrifice guess that tests the variable letter across multiple candidates simultaneously. For _IGHT: a guess containing L, N, M, R, and S (MORNS or similar) tests five of the eight options in one play.