Word Guess

How to play Word Guess

Word Guess is a clean, original take on the public-domain style of letter-deduction game that has entertained puzzlers for generations. Your job is simple to state and surprisingly deep to master: find a hidden five-letter word in six guesses or fewer. Every guess you type must itself be a real word, and the moment you press Enter each of its five letters lights up in one of three colours that tell you how close you are. Read those colours carefully, cross out possibilities in your head, and steadily corner the answer. There is one shared Daily word that is exactly the same for every player around the world each day, so you can compare notes with friends, plus an unlimited Practice mode with a fresh random word whenever you want another round. The word list here is entirely original — hand-picked common English words — and the game runs completely in your browser, even offline.

The goal

Identify the secret five-letter word using as few guesses as possible. You have six attempts. After each valid guess the tiles are coloured to show which letters are correct and where, and you use that feedback to refine your next guess. Win by turning a whole row green; solve it in fewer guesses (and more quickly) to earn a higher score on the Daily puzzle.

The rules

• Each guess must be a valid five-letter word from the game’s dictionary. If you type something that is not on the accepted list — or fewer than five letters — the row shakes and nothing is used up, so a rejected guess never costs you an attempt.
• You get six guesses in total. Type with the on-screen keyboard or your physical keyboard, press Enter to submit and Delete (Backspace) to fix a letter before you commit.
• After you submit, all five tiles are coloured at once, and the on-screen keyboard remembers what you have learned: each key takes on the best colour that letter has earned so far.
• The game ends when you turn a row completely green (a win) or when you use all six guesses without finding the word (a loss), in which case the answer is revealed.

What the colours mean

The three tile colours are the whole game. Learning to read them precisely — especially when a word contains repeated letters — is the difference between guessing and solving.

• Green — right letter in the right spot. That letter is locked to that position; keep it there in every later guess.
• Amber (yellow) — the letter is in the word, but not in that position. Try it somewhere else in your next guess.
• Gray — the letter is not in the word at all (or you have already found all of its copies). Avoid it from now on.

Repeated letters follow one careful rule. The tiles are coloured in two passes: first every exact match is turned green, then the remaining letters are checked against only the copies of each letter that are still unaccounted for. So if your guess contains two of a letter but the answer contains just one, only one of your two tiles will light up — a green if it is in the right place, otherwise a single amber — and the other identical letter turns gray. For example, if the answer holds a single E and your guess uses two E’s, at most one E shows colour. This is the standard, fair way to handle duplicates, and it is exactly what the coloured keyboard reflects.

The Daily word and Practice mode

Daily mode gives everyone on Earth the same hidden word each calendar day, chosen from the answer list by a shared date-based seed and labelled with the UTC date shown above the board. Because it is seeded from the date rather than randomly, you and a friend on opposite sides of the world are solving the identical puzzle — great for comparing how many guesses each of you needed. You may play the Daily word once per day; your progress is saved on the device, so refreshing the page will not reset it or let you replay for a better score. When you want more, switch to Practice for an endless stream of random words that never touch your Daily result.

A note on language

Word Guess is an English word game: the hidden words and the words you type are always English five-letter words, on every device and in every region. Everything around the puzzle, however — this guide, the buttons, the daily label, the win and loss messages and the keyboard hints — is fully translated into all of the app’s supported languages, so you can enjoy the game comfortably in your own language while still puzzling over English words.

Strategy tips

• Open with a word rich in common letters. Strong first guesses spread five different, frequent letters across the board — words such as CRANE, SLATE, ROAST, AUDIO or TRAIN quickly reveal which vowels and consonants are in play.
• Spend your second guess on new letters. Rather than reusing what you already found, test five more common letters (for instance follow CRANE with something like MOIST or DOILY) to eliminate as much of the alphabet as possible early on.
• Respect the greens and reposition the ambers. Keep every green letter fixed in place, and in your next word move each amber letter to a different column — never leave it where it just failed.
• Mind the vowels and the endings. Once you know which vowels appear, common patterns and endings — double letters, or endings like -OUND, -IGHT, -ATCH — help you land the final answer.
• When you are unsure, guess to learn, not just to win. If two or three candidates remain and you have guesses to spare, a word that contains several of the letters that distinguish them can rule them out in one go.

How scoring works

Only the Daily puzzle is ranked. When you solve the Daily word you earn points that reward efficiency: fewer guesses are worth far more, on a sliding scale from a one-guess solve down to a six-guess solve, plus a small speed bonus that fades over the first five minutes. Scores always fit within the leaderboard’s 1–99,999 range. Practice games are unlimited and deliberately do not affect your score, so you can experiment freely. Sign in to save your best Daily result to the leaderboard.

Frequently asked questions