Daily Word Puzzle

How to play

1. Type any five-letter word and press Enter. You can use your physical keyboard or tap the on-screen keys.
2. Read the colours. Each tile tells you something about that letter, and the on-screen keyboard keeps a running summary so you do not have to re-read old rows.
3. Use what you learned. Every subsequent guess should respect the clues you already have — a letter you know is in the word belongs in every guess after that.
4. Solve it within six guesses. The board holds six rows; when the last one is filled, the answer is revealed.
5. Press 📋 Copy result to put a spoiler-free emoji grid on your clipboard, then come back tomorrow for a new word.

The colour code

After each guess, every tile is marked with one of three states:

Green tiles also carry a small ✓ and yellow tiles a small ◆, so the board stays readable if you find those two colours hard to tell apart.

The subtle part is duplicated letters, and it is where most players’ intuition goes wrong. The scoring runs in two passes. First, every letter that sits in the right place is marked green and consumed from the answer’s letter pool. Only then are the remaining guess letters checked against what is left over, from left to right, and marked yellow while supplies last.

An example. Suppose the answer is ERASE and you guess SPEED. No letter is in the right place, so nothing is green. The pool holds E, R, A, S, E — two Es. Working left to right: S finds an S and turns yellow, P finds nothing, the first E takes one of the two Es, the second E takes the other, and D finds nothing. The result is 🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜.

Now flip it — answer SPEED, guess ERASE. The pool is S, P, E, E, D. Your first E and last E both turn yellow, the S turns yellow, and R and A stay grey: 🟨⬜⬜🟨🟨. Same two words, different feedback, because the pool is different.

The rule that catches people out: if the answer has one copy of a letter and you guess two, only one of yours gets coloured. A grey tile does not always mean “this letter is absent” — it can also mean “you have already used up every copy of it”. That is a genuine clue, and a strong one.

Scoring and statistics

There is no points system — you either solve the word or you do not. What the game tracks instead is a small set of habits:

• Played — how many puzzles you have finished, win or lose.
• Win % — the share of those you solved.
• Current streak — consecutive daily puzzles solved. It only continues if you play the very next puzzle number; skip a day and it resets to one on your next win.
• Max streak — the longest run you have ever had, kept forever even after the current one breaks.
• Guess distribution — a bar for each of the six rows, showing how often you finish on that guess. A healthy distribution peaks at three or four.

Your shared grid shows only colours, the puzzle number and your score as 4/6 (or X/6 if you ran out of rows). It never contains the word, so it is safe to post before your friends have played.

Tips to improve

• Start with a vowel-heavy opener. Words like AUDIO, SLATE, CRANE or ADIEU test several of the most common letters at once. It matters less which one you pick than that you pick one and learn how it behaves.
• Spend guess two on new letters. Unless you already have three greens, a second guess that reuses letters you have tested wastes information. Ten distinct letters across two guesses narrows the field enormously.
• Read your greys as hard facts. They are usually more informative than the yellows, because each one eliminates every remaining candidate containing that letter.
• Watch for the common endings. A great many five-letter words end in -ER, -LY, -ED, -CH, -GHT or -ND. If you have a T floating around in yellow, try it at the end.
• Beware the one-letter trap. When you reach _ATCH, there are half a dozen candidates — BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH. With three rows left, guessing a throwaway word that tests four of those consonants at once beats guessing them one at a time.
• Accept the duplicate. If you have four greens and no idea what fits, ask whether a letter you already have might appear twice. LEVEL, GEESE, ERROR and SASSY all catch people who assume every letter is different.
• Say the letters aloud. Reading a pattern like S _ O R E as sounds rather than shapes often surfaces the answer faster than staring at it.

Privacy

Everything happens inside your browser. The word list ships with the page, the word of the day is derived from the date by a small function running on your device, and your guesses are scored in JavaScript on this page. Your streak, statistics and today’s unfinished board live in this browser’s localStorage. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and clearing your site data removes every trace of your play history.

Last reviewed: September 21, 2026