How to Play Wordle

You get six guesses to find a hidden five-letter word. Each guess must be a valid dictionary word of exactly five letters — the game will reject anything that isn't in its word list.

After you submit a guess, every letter tile changes colour based on whether that letter appears in the answer and whether it's in the right position.

Green means the letter is correct and in the correct position. Yellow means the letter is somewhere in the answer, but not in that position. Grey (or black, depending on your theme) means the letter does not appear in the answer at all — unless duplicates change that, which is covered below.

This is the part most new players get wrong. If your guess contains a letter twice but the answer only contains it once, only one of the two tiles will be coloured green or yellow — the other will be grey.

For example, if the answer is SPEED and you guess ERASE, the two E's in your guess are handled individually: the game checks how many times that letter actually appears in the answer and colours tiles accordingly, prioritising exact position matches (green) before marking any remaining duplicates as present-but-misplaced (yellow). Any extra copies beyond what the answer contains are marked grey.

Hard mode is an optional setting that forces every subsequent guess to reuse any letters you've already confirmed as green or yellow. It removes the option to make a purely exploratory guess later in the game, which makes elimination strategies less flexible but rewards precise deduction.

A new puzzle is released once per day, at midnight in your local time zone, and everyone playing that day sees the same word. There is also typically an archive or practice mode for playing past puzzles.

After finishing, players can share a grid of coloured squares that shows their guess pattern without revealing the actual letters — a way to compare results with friends without spoiling the answer.