Quick answer

Wordle gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word. Green means the right letter in the right place, yellow means the right letter in the wrong place, and gray means the letter is not in the word. The answer changes once a day at midnight local time.

How to play Wordle in one minute

  1. Open the official New York Times Wordle and enter a valid five-letter word.
  2. Read the result: green is correct and placed, yellow is present but misplaced, and gray is normally absent.
  3. Keep every green letter in its position. Move yellow letters to new positions and avoid confirmed gray letters.
  4. Use untested letters when several answers still fit. Each row should either solve the puzzle or reduce uncertainty.
  5. Continue until the answer is found or the sixth guess is used.

A first word with five different letters gives you five separate tests. Our corpus comparison found that balanced openers such as STARE, RAISE, and SLATE expose more useful consonants than a four-vowel word. See the numbers in our starting-word analysis.

The Wordle rules in full

The complete rule set is short. These are the rules the New York Times game actually enforces:

  1. The answer is one five-letter word. It is the same for every player that day and changes once per day at local midnight. See today's Wordle answer and hints for the current puzzle, what today's Wordle starts with for a single-letter nudge, or the full archive for any past date. Brand new to the game? The Wordle of the Day guide is the gentlest starting point.
  2. You have six guesses. Each guess must be a real, accepted five-letter word; the game rejects non-words and will not spend a row on them.
  3. Every guess is scored tile by tile. Green means right letter, right place. Yellow means right letter, wrong place. Gray means the letter is not in the answer (with a duplicate-letter exception below).
  4. Repeated letters are counted. If your guess has two of a letter and the answer has one, you get one colour and one gray. A gray copy never cancels a coloured copy of the same letter in that row.
  5. Hard mode is optional. When it is on, every revealed green and yellow clue must be reused in your later guesses. It does not change the answer, only your allowed guesses. See the hard-mode guide for legal-guess strategy.
  6. There is no points system. Your result is the guess count out of six, plus a streak for consecutive daily solves.

Common misreading:yellow does not mean “one position away.” It only means the letter is somewhere else in the word.

How Wordle works and how it is scored

Under the surface, Wordle compares your guess to a hidden target word and returns a colour for each of the five positions. It assigns greens first, then yellows for letters that still have an unmatched copy in the answer, then gray for everything left over. That order is why duplicate letters behave the way they do.

“How does Wordle work” and “how is Wordle scored” are really the same question: the colours are the score. There is no hidden points value. When you finish, the game shows the row number you solved on (for example, 4/6), your current streak, and a grid of coloured squares you can share. A failed puzzle shows X/6 and resets the streak. The daily puzzle is free; a subscription only adds the archive and the WordleBot breakdown.

If you want the full clue-to-word logic that a solver applies to those same colours, see how a Wordle solver works.

What the Wordle tile colors mean

Green means the right letter in the right place, yellow means the letter is in the word but somewhere else, and gray usually means it is not in the word. Keep green letters fixed, move yellow ones, and drop gray ones after checking for duplicates. For the full breakdown, including what yellow means, gray duplicates, and the orange and blue high-contrast colours (the red or orange square), see Wordle colors meaning. Challenge videos that hide or swap the colours use their own rules, covered in Color Masked and Colour Swap Wordle. Once you can read a row confidently, Wordle in 1, the New York Times bonus puzzle, tests exactly that skill with a single clue.

CRANE

In this example, A stays in position three. C must appear somewhere other than position one. R, N, and E can normally be removed.

The word “normally” matters: if a guess contains two copies of a letter and only one is coloured, the gray copy does not erase the coloured one. The double-letter guide covers that case with tested examples, and does today's Wordle have a double letter covers how to check without spoiling the answer.

Turn each clue into a useful next guess

Start with constraints, then think about information. A green letter is fixed. A yellow letter must be included elsewhere. A fully gray letter is excluded. Once a word meets those rules, ask whether it tests letters that separate the remaining possibilities.

When the first row is mostly gray

Use mostly new, common letters. Repeating four gray letters in the next row spends another guess without learning much. In normal mode, a deliberate test word can be more useful than chasing a low-probability answer.

When several words share one pattern

A pattern such as _IGHT has many familiar completions. Guessing FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, and NIGHT in sequence can consume the board. A word that tests several competing initials at once may identify the right branch faster. In hard mode, the game's clue requirements can limit that option.

When you have mixed colors for one letter

Count confirmed copies before removing anything. One green P plus one gray P usually means the answer contains exactly one P. Two coloured E tiles mean the answer needs at least two E's.

A valid guess is not always a likely answer

Wordle needs a larger list of accepted guesses than daily answers. That allows a player to enter a less common word for letter testing even if it would be an unusual solution. It also explains why two word tools can return different result counts.

WordleSolver currently filters a broad 3,424-word five-letter corpus. It is useful for matching clue patterns, but we do not present it as the private or current daily-answer list. You may see regional forms, inflections, or terms that are better treated as guesses than predictions. Some word types are barred from ever being the answer even though you can guess them — regular plurals and regular past-tense verbs, for example. See can Wordle answers be plural? for exactly which word forms are eligible.

Practical rule: when two candidates fit equally well, favour the familiar word for an answer attempt and the broader-coverage word for an information attempt.

Use a Wordle helper without losing the puzzle

You control how much help the solver gives. Enter only your green, yellow, and gray clues to check your reasoning. Keep the candidate panel closed if you want a nudge, or open it when the board has stopped being fun.

Our Wordle solver works in the browser and supports per-row yellow positions, duplicate counts, optional starting and ending filters, and a ranked next-guess list. The separate strategy guide focuses on solving without immediately revealing every candidate. For other letter puzzles, the rack-letter word finder and five-letter word list use the same underlying word data.

Sources and further reading