How to play Wordle
Unofficial hints. Not affiliated with The New York Times.
Wordle hides a five-letter word and gives you six guesses to find it. Each guess comes back colored: green where a letter is in the right place, yellow where the letter belongs to the word but sits somewhere else, and gray where it is not in the word at all.
Your opening word is the only move you make with no information, so a good one is not about luck — it is about how much the colors can teach you whatever the answer turns out to be. Everything after that is deduction: keep the greens, move the yellows, and never spend a letter you have already ruled out.
Wordle at a glance
- Board
- Six rows of five tiles each
- Goal
- Find the hidden five-letter word within six guesses
- New puzzle
- Every day at midnight in your own time zone All reset times
- Where to play
- NYT Games website and app
The rules
- Guess a hidden word in six tries (most versions use five letters).
- Green: right letter in the right spot. Yellow: the letter is in the word, but elsewhere. Gray: the letter isn't in the word.
- A letter can appear more than once — a gray tile for a repeated letter means the word has no additional copy of it.
How a game goes, step by step
- Open with a balanced word. Something like CRANE, SLATE or TRACE tests three common consonants and two vowels in a single guess.
- Read all five tiles, not only the green ones. A gray tile is as useful as a green one, because it removes that letter from every position at once.
- Build the second guess to learn rather than to win: keep the greens where they are, move each yellow to a spot you haven't tried, and fill the rest with letters you haven't tested at all.
- If the opener came back almost all gray, change letter sets completely instead of tweaking a word that is mostly wrong. All-gray is information too.
- By the third or fourth guess you usually have enough greens and eliminated letters to list the few words that still fit, and from there it is reasoning about candidates rather than strategy.
Three tips for your first games
- Think about where a letter usually sits, not only how common it is. S clusters at the start and the end of a word, while R turns up often in second or third place.
- Never reuse a gray letter, and never leave a yellow in the position where it came back yellow. Both are wasted guesses in disguise.
- If the field stops narrowing, consider a repeated letter. A gray tile for a letter you have already seen in green or yellow means the word holds no further copy of it.
Questions about Wordle
Is there one best Wordle starting word?
No. CRANE, SLATE, TRACE and CRATE all work because they combine very common letters in one guess, while ADIEU works differently by testing four vowels and only one consonant. Which suits you depends on whether you get stuck on consonants or on vowel placement.
What does hard mode change?
It requires every later guess to reuse the greens and yellows you have already found, so you can't spend a turn purely on gathering information. Under that constraint an opener built from common letters leaves you more workable follow-ups than an unusual one.
Should my second guess try to be the answer?
Usually not. A second guess chosen to test fresh letters narrows the field further than a hopeful stab at the solution, and you still have four tries in hand afterwards.
When does a new Wordle puzzle come out?
NYT puzzles change at midnight in your own time zone, so players further east see the new puzzle first. Everyone gets the same puzzle for a given date.
Where can I play Wordle?
On the New York Times Games website and in the NYT Games app.
How do I get help without spoiling the puzzle?
Our daily Wordle page reveals hints one step at a time, from a gentle nudge to the full answer, so you only see as much as you need.