Wordle · Guide

How to Play Wordle — Full Guide

Everything about Wordle in one place: the rules, how to read the letter feedback, the best starting words and hard-mode strategy — plus where to grab today's answer.

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What Is Wordle?

Wordle is the daily game that started the whole "-dle" wave: six tries to find a five-letter word, with every guess grading each letter as placed, misplaced, or absent. Created by Josh Wardle in 2021 and bought by The New York Times in 2022, it serves one puzzle a day — the same word for every player on Earth — which is exactly what makes streaks, sharing, and the morning-coffee ritual work. Despite the near-identical name, Wordle (words) is not Worldle (country outlines).

How to Play, Step by Step

Open with information

Your first guess should probe five common, distinct letters — CRANE, SLATE, and TRACE are statistically strong; ADIEU checks four vowels at once. The goal of guess one isn't to win; it's to learn.

Read the feedback

A correct letter locks a position. A misplaced letter is often more valuable — it's in the word, just elsewhere, which prunes hard. And eliminated letters quietly shrink the candidate list from hundreds of words to a handful.

Close it out

By guess three or four you should be placing known letters, not fishing. Stuck between LIGHT, MIGHT, and NIGHT? Outside hard mode, burn a guess on a word that holds several of those leading letters and finish with certainty.

Wordle Strategy & Hard Mode

The two habits that raise a win rate: pairing your opener with a second word of ten fresh letters (SLATE then CORNY), and respecting repeated letters — roughly one answer in six doubles a letter, and it's the most common streak-killer. Hard mode forces every revealed hint to be reused, which bans the "burn a guess" trick; it's the purist's setting and noticeably harder on double-letter days. Our daily page scores each answer's difficulty so you can see exactly which trap the day set.

More Than Just the Answer

Plenty of sites print the day's word. Behind every answer, we add what it actually means — definition, pronunciation, and usage — plus a transparent 1–10 difficulty score computed from letter rarity, repeats, and vowel scarcity. Each day becomes a tiny vocabulary lesson, and the archive back to #0 doubles as a record of the game's hardest days.

Wordle FAQ

What is Wordle?
Wordle is a daily word game published by The New York Times: you have six tries to find a five-letter word, and every guess grades each letter as correct, misplaced, or absent. One puzzle per day, the same word for everyone.
Is Wordle free to play?
Yes — the daily puzzle is free on the NYT site and apps. Past puzzles (the Wordle Archive) require a NYT Games subscription, which is why our free answer archive back to #0 exists.
Is Wordle the same as Worldle?
No. Wordle is the five-letter word game; Worldle (with an L) is the geography game where you guess a country from its outline. They just have confusingly similar names.
What are the best Wordle starting words?
Words that probe five common, distinct letters: CRANE, SLATE, TRACE, or ADIEU for vowels. Pairing SLATE with CORNY covers ten high-frequency letters in two guesses.
Where can I find past Wordle answers?
Every answer since launch day is in our free archive — each with hints, its meaning, and a difficulty score.