How to Play Wordle: Rules, Colors & Starter Strategy

The rules of Wordle

Every Wordle puzzle hides one five-letter word, and you get six guesses to find it. Each guess has to be a real five-letter word the game recognizes — random letter strings aren't accepted — and after you submit one, every letter's tile changes color to tell you how close that letter is to correct.

There's no partial credit for guesses beyond the color feedback itself, and no penalty for a wrong guess besides using up one of your six attempts. The puzzle ends the moment you either guess the exact word or run out of guesses, whichever comes first, and a new word unlocks the next day.

What the colors actually mean

Green means that exact letter is in that exact position in the answer — you've locked it in, and it should stay in that spot for the rest of your guesses. Yellow means the letter is somewhere in the answer, just not in the position you placed it; it needs to move to a different spot in a future guess. Gray means the letter isn't in the answer at all, at least not in the way you've used it in that guess.

Repeated letters are where the color logic gets trickier: if a letter appears twice in the answer but you've only guessed it once, that one instance is scored normally against the two available slots. If a letter appears once in the answer but you guess it twice, only one of your two guesses can come back green or yellow — the other comes back gray, because the puzzle has already accounted for the single real instance elsewhere in your guess.

Picking a strong starting word

A good opener does one job: it maximizes how much you learn from a single guess, before you know anything about the answer. That usually means favoring words with several different, common vowels and consonants rather than one with repeated letters, since a repeated letter in your guess can only ever teach you about one slot in the answer even if it appears twice in your word.

Many strong openers lean on frequent letters like S, T, R, N, and E, spread across five distinct positions rather than clustered — a word like a common consonant-vowel blend that hits several of those at once tends to outperform an equally common word that repeats a letter. Some solvers go further and use two fixed opening words back to back — one heavy on common vowels, one heavy on common consonants — before looking at the board's actual feedback at all, trading two guesses of pure information-gathering for a much narrower field on guess three.

How hard mode changes things

Standard Wordle lets you guess any valid five-letter word on every turn, even one that ignores everything you've already learned. Hard mode removes that freedom: any letter that's come back green has to stay in that same position in every later guess, and any letter that's come back yellow has to appear somewhere in your next guess, even if you don't yet know exactly where it belongs.

That constraint makes the two-opener strategy above less useful in hard mode, since your second guess can't freely ignore the first guess's yellow and green results the way it can in standard mode. Hard mode doesn't change the six-guess limit or the color rules themselves — it only restricts which guesses you're allowed to make once you've already learned something.

Puzzle numbers and the daily streak

Every Wordle carries a puzzle number rather than a date in the way solvers usually talk about it — "Wordle 1,247" instead of a calendar day — because the number is what stays identical for every player regardless of which time zone they're solving in. The New York Times turns the answer over once per day, and since the change happens at local midnight on your own device rather than at a single global moment, players spread across time zones can be solving different puzzle numbers for a few hours around the boundary.

A lot of the game's social pull comes from its share feature: a grid of colored squares that reproduces your guesses' color pattern without spelling out the actual letters, safe to post without spoiling the word for anyone who hasn't solved yet. Alongside that, the app tracks a running streak of consecutive days solved and your distribution of how many guesses your wins typically take — both of which are common screenshots on their own, separate from the daily share grid.

Tips for solving Wordle faster

1. Don't waste a guess confirming something you already know. If a letter's already green, keep it there instead of re-testing it in a different word purely out of habit.
2. Treat yellow as "somewhere else," not "nowhere here." A yellow tile only rules out the position you guessed it in — it can still belong in that same word, just shifted.
3. Use your third guess to split the remaining field, not just to guess an answer. If several words still fit your known greens and yellows, a guess that distinguishes between them is often more useful than a guess that could itself be the answer.
4. Watch for double letters once you're down to a handful of candidates. A word that repeats a letter can hide behind gray or yellow feedback that reads differently than a solver expects on a first look.
5. Keep a short mental list of common five-letter endings like -IGHT, -OUND, or -ATCH — recognizing a likely ending narrows a four-or-five-candidate guess down to one far faster than guessing blind.

More NYT puzzle guides

Wordle is one of several daily word puzzles TodayHint covers. If you're after a bigger canvas than five letters, see how to play the Mini Crossword, or for a word-chain puzzle built around a twelve-letter box, see how to play Letter Boxed. Prefer hunting pangrams? How to play Spelling Bee covers the hexagon letter puzzle, and the TodayHint homepage rounds up hints for every game the site tracks.