What Is Wordle and How Do You Play It?

Wordle is a free daily word puzzle: you get six tries to guess a hidden five-letter word, and after each guess the tiles change color to tell you how close you were. You can play it in a browser with no account and no download, and everyone playing that day gets the same word. The rules take about a minute to learn; the skill is in how you use the color feedback.

The basic rules

• The answer is always a five-letter word.
• You have six guesses.
• Every guess must be a real five-letter word the game accepts.
• After each guess, each letter tile is colored to show what it tells you about the answer.
• You win by spelling the answer within six guesses. If you run out, the answer is revealed.

What the colors mean

The colors are per tile, not per letter, which matters when a word contains a repeated letter. If you guess a word with two of the same letter and only one turns green or yellow, the answer contains that letter only once — the other copy is gray.

How to play a round, step by step

1. Open the game and start today's puzzle. You get one puzzle per day; once you finish or fail, the next one unlocks the following day.
2. Type a five-letter starting word and submit it. Any valid word works. A common approach is to pick a word with several common letters (vowels plus frequent consonants) so the first guess rules as much in or out as possible.
3. Read the colors and update what you know. Treat each color as a constraint: green locks a letter into a position, yellow tells you the letter is present but must move, gray removes it.
4. Choose the next guess to test the most uncertainty. Early on, a word that probes several untested common letters usually teaches you more than a word that only fits what you already know.
5. Narrow toward the answer. As constraints pile up, your guesses should increasingly be candidate answers rather than probes.
6. Submit the answer within six guesses. If you get it, you see your result; if not, the answer is shown and the round ends.

Expected result: by the last guess or two, you should have enough constraints that only a small set of words still fit.

Practical strategy

• Open with a letter-diverse word. A first guess that covers common vowels and consonants gives you more information than one that repeats letters.
• Use your second guess to cover what the first missed. If your opener left several common letters untested, a second probe word can eliminate or confirm them before you commit to a specific answer.
• Track letters, not just tiles. Keep a mental (or written) list of confirmed letters, confirmed positions, and eliminated letters.
• Watch repeated letters. This is the most common source of wrong conclusions. A gray tile for a letter you've already placed does not mean the letter is absent — it means that extra copy isn't in the word.
• When you're close, guess real candidates. Once you have three or four green letters, probing words can waste a guess; pick a word that could actually be the answer.

Common ways people lose

• Misreading duplicate letters. Assuming a letter is absent when only the second copy was gray.
• Burning guesses on probes too late. Probing is useful early; near the end it costs you the round.
• Ignoring yellow positions. A yellow letter must move, so reusing it in the same spot wastes a guess.
• Forgetting it's one puzzle per day. If you miss a day, that puzzle is gone — there's no backlog to catch up on in the standard daily format.

Where Wordle fits among daily games

Wordle is the template for a whole family of "dles" — daily games that change every day and give every player the same puzzle. The Dles (dles.aukspot.com) catalogs 700+ of these free daily games across word, puzzle, trivia, logic, and geography categories, and states that the games are free and require no account or subscription. If you like Wordle's once-a-day rhythm, that collection is the natural next stop; if you only want the original five-letter word game, you can ignore the rest.