Everything you need to go from occasional solver to consistent winner — from your first guess to cracking Hard Mode.
Wordle gives you six attempts to guess a secret five-letter word. After each guess the tiles change colour to tell you how close you are. The same puzzle is shared by everyone in the world each day — there is only one answer per day.
The key insight most players miss: Wordle is an information game. Every guess should tell you something new. Wasting guesses on letters you've already ruled out is the most common reason people fail.
This is the foundation. If you're misreading the colours you're making the game harder than it needs to be.
Watch out for repeated letters. If a letter appears twice in your guess and once in the answer, one tile goes yellow and one goes grey. This trips up many players — a grey tile for a letter doesn't always mean it's absent, it can mean there's no second copy of it.
Your first guess sets up everything that follows. A strong opener gives you maximum information regardless of what the answer is.
The best openers share three qualities: they contain common letters (E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S), they have no repeated letters, and they spread letters across all five positions.
For a full ranking of the best starting words with analysis, see our Best Wordle Starting Words guide.
Grey tiles are definite. If A went grey, never guess a word containing A again. This sounds obvious but it's the most common mistake — especially when you're stuck and grasping for words.
Yellow means the letter is in the word but NOT in that slot. Your next guess must include that letter but place it somewhere else. Many players forget the "different position" part.
A huge number of Wordle answers end in -ER, -LY, -ED, -ING (as -NING, -RING), -AL, -LE. If you've got three letters confirmed, try fitting them into these ending patterns.
Unless you have strong confirmed letters, your second guess should test five completely new letters — not reuse any from guess 1. This doubles your information before you start narrowing down.
Before guessing, mentally count how many words fit what you know. If there are more than 10 possibilities, consider an elimination guess rather than going straight for the answer.
Panic guesses on guess 5 are where streaks die. If multiple answers still fit, pick the one that eliminates the most remaining options rather than just the first one that comes to mind.
Around 15% of Wordle answers contain a repeated letter (MUMMY, ABBEY, CREEK). If you're stuck and the obvious words aren't fitting, consider that the answer might have a double letter.
S appears most often in position 1. E is most common in position 5. R is very common in position 2. These positional tendencies can help you slot confirmed letters into likely positions.
There's no shame in using a Wordle solver on a hard day. Our Wordle Helper shows every word still possible given your clues — it doesn't give you the answer, it gives you options.
Many top players use the same opener every single day. Consistency builds pattern recognition — after a few weeks you'll start seeing common follow-up words automatically based on what your opener returns.
Enter your green, yellow, and grey results and see every possible answer instantly.
Open Wordle Solver →Hard Mode forces you to use all confirmed (green) and hinted (yellow) letters in every subsequent guess. This is significantly harder because you lose the ability to make pure elimination guesses.