🟩 Word Guess Guide

What Is Word Guess?

Word Guess is our daily word puzzle in the Wordle style: you have six attempts to find a secret five-letter word, and after each guess the tiles light up to tell you how close you came. There's exactly one word per day, and it's the same word for every player - so when you solve it in three, that's the same three everyone else was fighting for. A new word arrives every day, and solving daily builds a streak that's tracked on the site leaderboard.

Each puzzle is a compact exercise in information theory disguised as a vocabulary quiz. The players who solve consistently in three or four guesses aren't the ones with the biggest vocabularies - they're the ones who extract the most information from every row of colored tiles. This guide covers exactly how they do it.

The Rules

• Six guesses to find the secret five-letter word. Every guess must be a real five-letter word.
• Green means the letter is correct and in the correct position.
• Yellow means the letter is in the word but in a different position.
• Gray means the letter isn't in the word at all (with a subtlety for repeated letters, covered below).
• One word per day, same for everyone. The puzzle resets daily with a fresh word - solve it each day to extend your streak.

Core Strategy: Extract Maximum Information

Choosing a starter word

Your opening guess should be a scouting mission, not a stab at the answer. The ideal starter packs in two or three common vowels and high-frequency consonants, with no repeated letters - words like ARISE, RAISE, ADIEU, SLATE, or CRANE. Whatever colors come back, a starter like that typically eliminates the vast majority of possible answers in one row. Many strong players use the same starter every day; consistency lets you learn exactly what each feedback pattern implies.

Eliminate versus confirm

After the first row, you face the game's central choice each turn. Confirming means guessing a word that could actually be the answer, reusing your greens and yellows. Eliminating means deliberately "burning" a guess on a word full of untested letters to split the remaining candidates apart. The rule of thumb: confirm when few candidates remain, eliminate when many do. If your greens leave a pattern like _IGHT with FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, and TIGHT all live, testing them one at a time can burn every guess you have - instead, play a word like FLIRT that probes several of those first letters at once, and the colors will point straight at the answer.

Letter frequency basics

In five-letter English words, the most common letters are E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, and N - guesses built from that pool test the likeliest material first. Position matters too: S is a very common first letter, E and Y are common last letters, and vowels cluster in the second and third slots. And remember that gray tiles are information, not failure: learning the word contains no E instantly discards a huge slice of the dictionary. A row with five grays is often more useful than a row with one yellow.

Hard-luck cases: repeated letters

Double letters are where streaks go to die. Words like SPELL, ERROR, ALLOW, and QUEEN each contain a repeated letter that no single-appearance guess will reveal. The feedback convention: colors match letter counts. If you guess a word with two Es and the answer has only one, one of your Es gets colored and the other shows gray - a gray that means "no additional E," not "no E." When you're down to your last guesses and nothing seems to fit, deliberately ask whether a doubled letter explains the pattern; it usually does.

Protecting Your Streak

Your streak counts consecutive days solved, and it's the number the leaderboard cares about - which changes optimal play. On a normal day, chase a fast solve. But when you reach guess five with several candidates still alive, switch to pure survival: use guess five to eliminate, even if it can't possibly be the answer, so that guess six is close to a sure thing. A six-guess solve and a three-guess solve extend the streak equally; a gamble that misses ends it. Slow and alive beats fast and busted, every single day.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Reusing known grays. Every slot spent on an eliminated letter is information thrown away. Before submitting, check your keyboard display for grayed-out letters hiding in your guess.
• Leaving a yellow in the same position. Yellow explicitly means "right letter, wrong spot" - repeating the position wastes the clue entirely. Move every yellow somewhere new.
• Guess-two tunnel vision. Locking onto one plausible answer immediately and spending rows confirming it. Hold at least two or three candidates in mind until the colors force a single survivor.
• Forgetting doubles exist. If no word seems consistent with your feedback, the answer probably repeats a letter you've already confirmed once.
• Gambling on guess six. With the streak on the line, the last guess should be the candidate most consistent with every color you've seen - not the rare word that would feel cleverer.

Frequently Asked Questions