Word Guess

Word Guess is a five-letter word puzzle in the deduction tradition made famous by Wordle. Every round hands you a hidden five-letter word and exactly six attempts to identify it. After each guess the five tiles flip to reveal how close you were, and because the feedback drives everything, learning to read it well is the whole game. It is free to play, needs no account, and keeps no score beyond the personal streak stored on your own device. There is nothing to buy and nothing to lose here — just you, the alphabet, and a puzzle that rewards patient, logical thinking.

This page is a complete guide to the version of Word Guess you can play on this site. It explains exactly how our build behaves — the two modes it offers, the colour and symbol feedback it gives, the tricky duplicate-letter rule it follows, and the keyboard and touch controls it supports — and then walks through strategy from your very first opening word all the way to advanced endgame technique. Everything described below is true to the game as we actually built it.

What is Word Guess?

Word Guess is a game of pure deduction. The answer is always a real, common five-letter English word. You do not need a big vocabulary of obscure terms; our answer list is deliberately curated from everyday words so that a solvable puzzle never depends on knowing something arcane. What you do need is the discipline to use each guess as an experiment: pick a word, read the coloured feedback carefully, and let it eliminate possibilities until only the answer remains.

Each guess you type must itself be a valid five-letter word. The game keeps a large acceptance list that includes every possible answer plus a wide set of additional valid words that can be used as guesses but will never be chosen as the hidden answer. If you enter letters that do not form a recognised word, the row gently shakes and a “Not in word list” message appears, so you never waste a turn on a typo or a random string of letters.

The three tile states

After you submit a guess, each of the five tiles flips to one of three states. Reading them correctly is the single most important skill in the game:

• Green (correct) — the letter is in the word and in exactly this position. A small check mark sits in the corner of the tile as well, so the meaning is clear even if you cannot distinguish the colour.
• Amber (present) — the letter is in the word but sits somewhere else, not in this spot. A tilde symbol marks these tiles.
• Grey (absent) — the letter does not appear in the word at all (with one important exception for duplicate letters, explained below). A small dot marks these tiles.

Every tile also carries a spoken label such as “A correct”, “R present” or “T absent” for screen-reader users, so the colour is never the only way to receive the information.

How to play, step by step

1. Type any valid five-letter word. On a computer, use your physical keyboard. On a phone or tablet, tap the letters on the on-screen keyboard beneath the board.
2. Press Enter (or tap the Enter key) to submit the guess. If you have typed fewer than five letters, the game flashes “Not enough letters” and waits — it will not submit an incomplete row.
3. Watch the five tiles flip to green, amber or grey. Read what each one tells you.
4. Use the feedback to choose a smarter next guess. The on-screen keyboard also recolours each key to summarise everything you have learned about that letter so far.
5. Repeat until you solve the word or use all six rows. If you solve it, the game celebrates with a message like “Solved in 3/6” — or “Genius! First try.” if you nail it on row one. If you run out of guesses, it reveals the answer so you always finish knowing the word.

Keyboard controls

• Letter keys A–Z — type your guess directly.
• Enter — submit the current row.
• Backspace — delete the last letter you typed so you can correct a row before submitting.

Touch and on-screen keyboard controls

On a touchscreen, a full QWERTY keyboard appears under the board. Tap letters to fill the current row, tap the wide Enter key to submit, and tap the backspace key (marked with the delete symbol) to remove a letter. The on-screen keyboard works on a desktop too, and it does double duty as a memory aid: each key tints to green, amber or grey to show the best result that letter has produced so far, so you can glance down and instantly see which letters are confirmed, which are still floating, and which are ruled out.

Daily and practice modes

Word Guess offers two distinct ways to play, and they suit different moods.

Daily mode

Daily mode gives everyone the same hidden word on a given calendar day. The word is chosen deterministically from the date, so the puzzle you face is identical to the one your friends face, which makes comparing results genuinely meaningful. A few things to know about Daily:

• Your progress is saved on your device. If you close the tab midway and come back, the board restores exactly where you left off — including a finished result, so you cannot accidentally replay the same day.
• Solving the daily puzzle builds a streak. Solve it on consecutive days and the streak counter climbs; miss a day or fail to solve, and it resets. Your current streak is shown as your score, and your longest-ever streak is stored as your best.
• Because it is one puzzle per day, Daily rewards care over speed. There is no timer and no penalty for thinking.

Practice mode

Practice mode picks a fresh random word every time and lets you play as many rounds as you like, back to back. There is no streak in practice — the point is repetition. When you finish a practice round, a “New word” button appears so you can immediately start another. Practice is the best place to test opening words, drill your letter-frequency instincts, and try risky ideas without touching your daily streak.

Sharing your result

When a round ends, the game builds an emoji grid of your guesses — green, amber and white squares mirroring the tiles you saw — along with a label and your guess count. A “Copy result” button places that grid on your clipboard so you can paste it into a chat and challenge a friend, all without spoiling the answer for them. The shared grid never reveals the letters, only the pattern of your path to the solution.

Strategy: building a strong opening

Your first guess is made with zero information, so its only job is to gather as much of it as possible. A strong opener tests common letters and spreads its vowels out.

• Favour words rich in frequent letters: E, A, R, O, T, L, S, N and I appear in a huge share of five-letter words.
• Spread your vowels rather than clustering them, so a single guess can confirm or rule out several vowels at once.
• Avoid wasting an opener on repeated letters — five different letters give five independent pieces of information.

Popular, well-balanced openers include CRANE, SLATE, TRACE, AROSE and AUDIO. There is no single “best” word; what matters is that your opener covers a lot of common ground. For a deeper dive into why certain openers outperform others, read our companion guide on the best starting words for Word Guess.

Choosing a second word

Your second guess is where good players separate themselves. If your opener produced few or no greens, resist the urge to react to a single amber. Instead, play a second word made of five completely new letters. Opening with SLATE and following with something like MOUND or CHIRP lets you probe ten distinct letters across two guesses. That usually narrows the field to a small handful of candidates before you commit to solving.

Strategy: reading amber tiles well

Amber is the most information-dense state in the game, and also the easiest to misuse. An amber tile tells you two things at once: the letter is in the word, and it is not in the position you just tried. Good players treat both halves as hard constraints.

• When you replay an amber letter, deliberately move it to a new column. Placing it back where it was already told to be wrong throws away a guess.
• Track which positions a letter has been excluded from. A letter that has been amber in two different spots has only three possible homes left.
• Combine amber constraints across guesses. If R is barred from positions 1 and 3, and you know the word ends in a consonant cluster, the R often has only one sensible place left.

Strategy: the duplicate-letter rule

This is the rule that trips up the most players, and our build follows it precisely. The game first marks every green (correct-position) match and mentally “uses up” one copy of that letter from the answer. Only then does it hand out amber, and only while an unused copy of that letter still remains. Any extra copies of a letter in your guess — beyond how many are actually in the answer — come back grey.

Here is why that matters in practice. Suppose the answer contains a single L, and your guess has two L’s:

• If one of your L’s is in the correct position, it turns green and consumes the answer’s only L. Your second L then has no copies left to claim, so it turns grey — even though the letter L is in the word.
• If neither L is in the right spot, the first L in reading order turns amber and the second turns grey.

Read this the smart way: a grey copy sitting next to a green or amber copy of the same letter is not telling you the letter is absent. It is telling you the word contains fewer of that letter than you just played. That is an incredibly precise clue about repeated letters, and learning to interpret it separates intermediate players from advanced ones.

Strategy: the endgame

Once you have two or three greens, the temptation is to lock in fast. Slow down. If you still have guesses to spare, the mathematically stronger play is often to spend one testing several candidate letters at once rather than shuffling letters you have already confirmed.

Classic traps live in the endgame. Consider a pattern like _ATCH: the blank could be M, B, C, L, W, H or P. If you guess them one at a time you can easily burn three rows and still fail. Instead, if you have a spare guess, play a single word that packs several of those candidate first letters together — even if it is not itself a likely answer — so one guess reveals which consonant is correct. This “probe” technique is the single biggest score-saver in tight situations.

• Watch for common endings: -OUND, -IGHT, -TCH, -AMP clusters, and plural-looking -S tails.
• Remember that Y can act as a vowel (as in NYMPH or GLYPH), which rescues you when the usual vowels are all ruled out.
• Use the recoloured on-screen keyboard as a live checklist of what is still in play before you commit.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

• Replaying grey letters. Once a letter is grey (and not a duplicate situation), it is gone. Reusing it wastes a slot. Glance at the keyboard tints before submitting.
• Putting an amber letter back where it was amber. Amber already told you that position is wrong. Move the letter.
• Ignoring the duplicate rule. Assuming a grey copy means “letter absent” when a matching green or amber sits nearby will send you down the wrong path.
• Solving too early. With guesses in hand, a probing word that tests new letters usually beats a hopeful stab at the answer.
• Vowel tunnel vision. If your first two guesses reveal no vowels in the obvious spots, consider Y, or a word with a vowel in an unusual position.

Scoring and improving your best

Word Guess is not scored on points but on how efficiently you solve. In Daily mode your streak is the number to protect: solve the puzzle every day and it grows; it is shown on screen as your current score, and your longest streak ever is kept as your best. All of this is stored locally on the device you play on — there is no account, no login, and nothing synced to a server. Clearing your browser data resets it, so treat the streak as a personal challenge rather than a permanent record.

To improve, focus on your average guess count in Practice. If you routinely solve in four or five, tighten your opening pair so you reach the endgame with more information. If you sometimes fail, the culprit is almost always endgame probing — practise the technique of testing multiple candidate letters in one word.

Is Word Guess gambling?

No. Word Guess is a free skill puzzle. There is no money involved, nothing to purchase, no prize of value, and no chance-based reward mechanism of any kind. The only “luck” in the game is which word the day happens to hold, and even that is neutralised by skill: a careful solver following the strategies above will identify almost any common five-letter word within six guesses. Your result depends on your reasoning, not on fortune. Nothing you do here can cost or earn you anything beyond the small satisfaction of a tidy solve and a growing streak.

Accessibility

We built Word Guess to be playable without relying on sight of colour or on animation:

• Symbols alongside colour. Every result tile carries a corner symbol — a check for correct, a tilde for present, a dot for absent — so the three states are distinguishable without colour vision.
• Screen-reader labels. The board is marked up as a grid, and each tile announces its letter and state, such as “A correct” or “T absent”. The on-screen keyboard keys announce their learned state too.
• Full keyboard play. The entire game is playable from a physical keyboard: letters to type, Enter to submit, Backspace to correct.
• Reduced motion. If your system requests reduced motion, the tile flip, pop and shake animations are switched off automatically while the game plays exactly the same.

Tips for phones and older devices

Word Guess is light and runs comfortably on modest hardware. A few pointers for the best mobile experience:

• Use the on-screen keyboard rather than trying to summon your device keyboard — it is sized for the game and shows the learned-letter tints.
• The layout is responsive and centres itself, so it works in portrait on a small screen without pinching or zooming.
• Because the game runs entirely in your browser with no heavy assets, it loads fast even on a slow connection, and your streak is saved locally so a flaky connection never loses your progress.
• If animations feel sluggish on an older phone, enabling your device’s reduced-motion setting removes them entirely for a snappier feel.

A worked example round

Nothing makes the strategy concrete like a full round. Imagine the hidden word is BLAZE (you would not know this while playing, of course).

1. Guess 1: SLATE. A solid opener covering S, L, A, T and E. The board comes back with L amber, A amber and E amber, while S and T turn grey. You have learned three letters are in the word — L, A and E — but none is yet in the right place, and there is no S or T.
2. Guess 2: PLEAD. Rather than shuffling the same letters blindly, you test new positions for L, A and E while probing P and D. Say L turns amber again, E turns amber again, A turns green in the fourth position, and P and D go grey. Now A is locked in position four, and you know L and E still need new homes.
3. Guess 3: WHALE. You place A in its confirmed fourth slot, try L and E in fresh positions, and probe W and H. Suppose A stays green, L turns amber once more, E turns green in position five, and W and H go grey.
4. Guess 4: BLAZE. With A in slot four, E in slot five, L needing a home in slot two, and the remaining letters pointing at B and Z, the answer resolves. Five greens — solved in four.

Notice how each guess did double duty: it tested new letters and repositioned known ones. That habit — never wasting a slot on information you already have — is the core of efficient solving.

A quick letter-frequency reference

Because the answer is always a common word, letter frequency is your friend. Rough guidance that holds up well in five-letter words:

• Most common vowels: E, A, O, then I and U. Getting E and A tested early is high value.
• Most common consonants: R, T, L, S, N and D appear constantly. Openers that pack several of these gather a lot of ground.
• Useful position tells: many words end in E, and doubled consonants often sit in the middle. R after a vowel and before a consonant is a frequent shape.
• The rescue letters: when the usual vowels are exhausted, remember Y as a vowel, and less common but real letters like K, V and W that resolve stubborn endgames.

You do not need to memorise a table — just lean your guesses toward the top of these lists early, then switch to targeted probes once the shape of the word appears.

Frequently asked questions about play

What happens if I close the tab mid-puzzle?

In Daily mode your progress is saved, so reopening the game restores the exact board you left, including a finished result. In Practice mode each round is fresh, so closing simply ends that round.

Can I play the daily puzzle more than once?

The daily word is one per day and your result is locked once finished, which is what makes comparing with friends fair. If you want unlimited rounds, switch to Practice mode.

Why did a letter I know is in the word show grey?

Almost always the duplicate-letter rule. If you played two copies of a letter that appears only once in the answer, one copy lights up and the extra shows grey. It is telling you the word has fewer of that letter than you guessed.

Is there a time limit?

No. There is no clock and no penalty for thinking. Take as long as you like on each guess.

More games to try

If you enjoy the deduction and pattern-spotting in Word Guess, a few of our other puzzles scratch a similar itch. Tile Connect rewards spatial pattern recognition and path-finding. Memory Match trains recall and mental mapping. And if you like the logical, mine-by-mine deduction of turning clues into certainties, Minesweeper is the natural next step.

A friendly closing word

Word Guess is the kind of puzzle that fits into the gaps of a day — a few minutes with a coffee, a quick round on the bus — yet still rewards you for getting better at it. Read the tiles carefully, respect the duplicate-letter rule, keep a new-letter word in your back pocket for the endgame, and protect that daily streak. There is no cost, no catch, and no chance-based reward: just a clean, honest test of how well you can turn five little clues into one right answer. Good luck, and may your openers land plenty of green.