What is Wordle?
Wordle is one five-letter word and six attempts to find it. Josh Wardle built it in 2021 for one person — his partner, who liked word games — and put it online later that year with a rule that turned out to matter more than the puzzle itself: everyone gets the same word, and there is only one per day.
The feedback is the whole game. Every guess colors in: green means the letter is correct and in the right place, yellow means the letter is in the word but somewhere else, grey means it is not in the word at all. Six guesses is enough to solve almost any word by deduction, and not nearly enough to solve it by luck.
How to play
- Press Play above. The board is a grid of six rows and five columns with a keyboard underneath.
- Type any real five-letter word and press Enter. If the game does not know the word, the row shakes and says "Word not found" — the attempt is not used up.
- Read the colors. Green is right letter, right spot; yellow is right letter, wrong spot; grey is not in the word. The keyboard keys color in the same way.
- Use what each guess rules out to narrow the next one.
- Letters can repeat. Two of the same letter in your guess will only both light up if the answer really contains two.
- Solve it and the statistics window opens with your streak, the share button and a countdown to tomorrow's word. Miss all six and the game shows you the answer.
Controls
A physical keyboard and the on-screen one are interchangeable; on a phone the on-screen keys are the whole interface.
| Action | Keyboard | On screen |
|---|---|---|
| Type a letter | A – Z | tap a key |
| Submit the guess | Enter | Enter key, bottom left |
| Remove the last letter | Backspace | Delete key, bottom right |
| How to play | — | question-mark icon, top left |
| Statistics and share | — | bar-chart icon, top right |
| Hard mode, dark mode, high contrast | — | gear icon, top right |
The three settings
- Hard Mode — any green or yellow letter you have uncovered must appear in every later guess, in place for greens. Break the rule and the guess is refused with "Must use E in position 3" or "Guess must contain R". It can only be switched on before the first guess of the day, and a hard-mode win is marked with an asterisk when you share.
- Dark Mode — a dark board and keyboard.
- High Contrast Mode — orange and blue tiles instead of green and yellow for color-blind players; the share grid uses matching emoji.
Tips and strategy
- Open with common letters. A first word rich in vowels and frequent consonants — CRANE, SLATE or TRACE — tests five high-frequency letters at once.
- Make the second guess different. Share as few letters as possible with the first. Repeating a grey letter wastes a whole turn.
- A yellow letter tells you two things: that the letter exists, and one place it cannot be. Move it, do not drop it.
- Watch for doubled letters. ABBEY, LLAMA and SPEED beat solvers who assume five distinct letters. If the common letters are all grey, think doubles.
- Do not rush the answer on turn three if several candidates remain. Spending one turn to separate _IGHT words is cheaper than guessing wrong twice.
- Read the keyboard, not just the grid. The grey keys are your list of letters that are gone; the remaining white keys are the entire search space.
A brief history
Josh Wardle, a software engineer from Wales working in New York, finished Wordle in 2021 as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah, who helped trim the answer list to words most people know. It went public in October 2021, and after the emoji share grid was added in December it spread across social media within weeks. The New York Times bought the game in January 2022 and has published it in its games section since. Because the original was a plain web page, open-source re-creations appeared almost immediately — the one on this page is among the best known.
About this version
What runs here is react-wordle, an open-source clone written in React and released under the MIT license — not the New York Times game, and not affiliated with it. The rules are the same: five letters, six guesses, one puzzle per day, chosen from the calendar so everyone playing on the same date gets the same word, and refreshed at midnight in your local time zone. What differs is the dictionary. This build draws its daily answer from a list of about 5,700 words and accepts nearly 13,000 valid guesses, so the answer pool is wider than the original's and includes some less common words. The share text reads "Wordle 987 4/6" plus the emoji grid; the number is this clone's own day count, not the official puzzle number. Statistics, streaks, settings and today's partial game are kept in your browser's local storage — nothing is sent to a server, so a different device starts from zero. There is no account, no archive of past puzzles and no unlimited mode: one word, once a day, like the original.
Finished today's word? 2048, Minesweeper and Tic Tac Toe are just as quick to pick up.
Frequently asked questions
Is Wordle free to play here?
Yes. The game runs in your browser on this page with no download, no install and no account. Press play, type a five-letter word and press Enter.
Is there a new Wordle every day?
Yes. This version picks its word from the calendar, so everyone who visits on the same day gets the same puzzle, and it changes at midnight in your local time zone. After you finish, the statistics window shows a 'New word in' countdown to the next one.
How many guesses do I get?
Six. The grid has six rows and every guess must be a real five-letter word from the game's dictionary. If you submit something it does not recognise, the row shakes and you see 'Word not found' — that attempt is not used up.
What do the green, yellow and grey tiles mean?
Green is the right letter in the right place. Yellow means the letter is in the word but in a different position. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all. The on-screen keyboard colours in the same way, so you can see at a glance which letters you have already ruled out.
What is hard mode?
With Hard Mode switched on in the settings menu, any green or yellow letter you have found must be used in every later guess. The game rejects a guess that drops a hint — it tells you 'Must use E in position 3' or 'Guess must contain R'. You can only turn it on before your first guess of the day.
Does it keep my streak and statistics?
Yes. The statistics window tracks total tries, success rate, current streak, best streak and a guess distribution. Everything is stored in your browser, so it stays on the same device and browser and disappears if you clear site data.
How do I share my result without spoiling the word?
After the last guess, press Share in the statistics window. On a phone it opens the system share sheet; on a desktop it copies the text to your clipboard. You get a line like 'Wordle 987 4/6' plus the green, yellow and grey emoji grid — never the letters.
Is there a dark mode or a colour-blind mode?
Both, under the gear icon at the top of the game. Dark Mode switches the board to a dark background. High Contrast Mode replaces green and yellow with orange and blue so the two states are easier to tell apart, and the emoji share grid uses the same colours.
