Wordle guide
How to Play Wordle: Rules, Colors, and a Beginner Walkthrough
New to the daily word puzzle? Here is how a round works, what every tile color means, and how to turn your first guess into a better second one.
How do you play Wordle?
Guess the hidden five-letter word in no more than six tries. After each accepted guess, green means the letter is in the correct position, yellow means it is in the word but in a different position, and gray means it is not in the answer unless a repeated-letter clue limits how many copies are present. Use that feedback to narrow your next guess.
Start a Wordle game in four steps
- Open the official game. Visit The New York Times Wordle and look at the five empty tiles in the first row. Wordle Word Finder is a separate helper, not the game itself.
- Enter a five-letter guess. Choose a word whose letters could teach you something. A word with several distinct, common letters is often more informative than one with repeated letters, although there is no opening guess that guarantees a win.
- Read the colors. Green locks in a position. Yellow keeps the letter but rules out the position you just tried. Gray usually rules out that letter. Do not treat the colors as a score: they are clues about the hidden word.
- Revise and repeat. Keep confirmed green letters in place, move yellow letters, and avoid letters ruled out by gray feedback. You win by entering the complete answer within six guesses.
A worked example: from STARE to CRANE
Imagine the secret word is CRANE and your first guess is STARE. This is a practice example, not a hint for today's puzzle. The S and T would be gray; A in the third position and E in the fifth would be green; R in the fourth position would be yellow because the answer contains R elsewhere.
Your next candidate must therefore fit _ _ A _ E, include an R somewhere other than position four, and normally avoid S and T. CRANE fits all of those clues. Notice that a yellow R does not reveal its exact position; it only confirms that the fourth slot is wrong. This is why changing one letter at random is less useful than applying every clue together.
How to make each guess more useful
Before submitting a new word, check three separate questions: Does it preserve every green position? Does each yellow letter appear somewhere other than its disallowed position? Does it avoid letters the feedback has ruled out? This quick check prevents a guess from repeating information you already have.
If your first guess reveals very little, testing several new letters can be more informative than rearranging the same ones. If it reveals three or four strong clues, focus on candidate words that satisfy them. These are reasoning habits, not guarantees: the value of a guess depends on the remaining possibilities and on the game's accepted-word list.
Watch for repeated letters. A gray copy of a letter does not always mean that letter is absent when another copy in the same guess is green or yellow. It can mean the answer contains fewer copies than you guessed. The New York Times–licensed Wordle: The Party Game rules illustrate this distinction. Read all tiles for that letter together before excluding it.
When a word finder helps—and what it cannot tell you
If you are stuck after a few guesses, our 5 Letter Word Finder can turn your clues into a candidate list. Put green letters in their exact numbered positions. Enter a yellow letter under the position where you tried it, so the finder knows that position is wrong. Add genuinely excluded letters in the gray-letter field, then choose Find Words. On a phone, the results appear above the filters so you can review and refine them without travelling through a long page.
For the practice example above, put A in position three and E in position five, put R in the yellow field for position four, and exclude S and T. Review the matching words rather than assuming the first result is the solution. Our list is a general word-finding database, not The New York Times' official answer list. Results can be sorted by Scrabble score or alphabetically; a high Scrabble score is not a prediction that a word is today's Wordle answer.
You can also play without a helper. Some players prefer to solve using only the game's feedback; others use a candidate list to learn how constraints work. Either way, your next guess should be checked against the clues on your own board.
Quick questions
Does yellow mean the letter goes in the next position?
No. Yellow only tells you that the letter is in the answer but not in the position shown by that guess. It could belong in any other open position.
Can a Wordle answer contain the same letter twice?
Yes. Keep repeated letters in mind, especially when one copy is colored and another is gray. Evaluate the copies together rather than crossing out the letter automatically.