Daily Word Game

How to play

1. Type a five-letter word with your keyboard or tap the letters on the on-screen keyboard, then press Enter. Use ⌫ (Delete letter) to fix a typo.
2. Each tile changes colour to show how close you are: - green: the letter is in the word and in the right spot; - yellow: the letter is in the word, but in another spot; - grey: the letter is not in the word (or not as many times as you typed it).
3. Use the clues to narrow down the answer. You have six tries.
4. When the round is over, click Copy result to copy a grid of coloured squares that shows how you did without revealing the word, and paste it into a chat or a post.

Everyone who plays on the same date gets the same word, so you can compare results with friends. A new word arrives at midnight, local time; a countdown shows how long you have to wait. Want more? Practice word gives you an unlimited random word that does not count in your statistics, and Back to today’s word returns to the daily puzzle.

How the colours are worked out

Exact matches are marked first. The remaining letters are then compared with the letters of the answer that have not been matched yet, and each letter of the answer can only “light up” one tile. If the answer is BRASS and you type SASSY, the fourth S is green, one other S turns yellow, and the third S stays grey because the answer only has two. This rule stops you from being misled about doubled letters.

The on-screen keyboard keeps the best information you have found for each letter, so you can see at a glance which letters are confirmed, which need moving and which are ruled out.

Strategy tips

• Open with common letters. Words that use E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S and N, with no repeats, rule out or confirm many letters at once. SLATE, CRANE or TRAIN are solid openers.
• Use your second guess to explore. If the first word gave little, try five new letters rather than playing around one yellow tile.
• Think about positions. A yellow letter tells you where the letter is not. English five-letter words often end in E, Y, T, R or D, and many start with S, C, B or T.
• Remember doubled letters. When you are stuck with many green tiles, the answer may repeat a letter (SPOON, LEVEL, ALLEY).
• Do not waste tries. Every guess should respect what you already know, unless you deliberately test several letters at once.

The word lists and your data

The answers are common English words (no plurals made by adding S and no simple past tenses), taken from the English Speller Database by Kevin Atkinson, which may be used freely. About 7,000 words are accepted as guesses. The word of the day is chosen by a seeded random order computed in your browser from the date: no server decides it, and no word comes back until the whole list has been used.

Your guesses, streak and statistics are stored only in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, and clearing your browsing data resets your statistics.

A short history of word-guessing games

Guessing a hidden word from coloured hints is an old idea. The pen-and-paper game Jotto, published in 1955, asked players to find a five-letter word from the number of letters in common. The board game Mastermind (1970) introduced the “right place / wrong place” feedback with coloured pegs, and the television show Lingo, first aired in 1987, applied it to five-letter words. The daily online format, with one shared word and a shareable grid of squares, became a worldwide habit in the early 2020s.