Word Guess strategy: how to solve Wordle-style puzzles in fewer tries

01What a good guess actually does

In a word-guessing game with six tries, every guess has two jobs: it might be the answer, and it gives you information. Early on the second job matters far more. A guess that cannot possibly be the answer can still be the best move, if it tells you more than any real candidate would.

Think of the game as cutting down a list. At the start, thousands of words fit. Each guess keeps only the words that would have produced exactly the colours you saw. A good guess is one that splits the remaining words into many small groups, so that whatever the colours turn out to be, few words are left. You can play this well without any maths, just by choosing letters that are common and positions that are varied. You can try it right away in Word Guess.

02Choosing a first guess

There is no magic word, and the best opener depends on the word list. But the rule of thumb holds in every language: use five different letters, and make them letters that appear in many words. Repeated letters waste a slot, because you learn about the same letter twice. Rare letters like Q, X, Z or J will almost always come back grey, which tells you little.

In English the letters that turn up most often in five-letter words are A, E, O, R, S, T, L, I, N and U. Openers built from them, such as CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU or ROAST, are popular for that reason. ADIEU tests four vowels at once, which is useful, but it says little about consonants, so many players prefer an opener with two vowels and three common consonants.

Pick one opener and stay with it for a while. If you always start the same way you learn how the colours usually turn out, and your second guess becomes faster and more accurate. Changing it each day makes it harder to build that intuition.

03Reading the colours: a worked example

Say the hidden word is PLANT, and you start with SLATE. The S is grey. The L is green, because it is second in both words. The A is green too. The T is yellow: it is in PLANT, but in fifth place, not fourth. The E is grey. So you now know the pattern is ?LA?? with a T somewhere in the last two places, and that S and E are out.

A strong second guess uses all of that. Keep L and A where they are, put the T in a new place, and try fresh letters in the gaps. Because a T is required and S and E are ruled out, only a handful of words fit, and you have a good chance of finding PLANT on guess three.

The point of the example is the method: write down the pattern with the known letters in place, list the letters that must appear somewhere, list the ones that are out, and then ask which words fit all three at once.

04Double letters

Double letters cause more lost games than anything else. The colours are worked out letter by letter, and a letter is only marked as many times as it really occurs in the hidden word. If the answer has one E and you guess a word with two Es, one E can be green or yellow and the other will be grey, even though E is in the word.

So a grey letter does not always mean the letter is absent. If the same letter is coloured elsewhere in the same row, the grey one just means that there are no more copies. When a word is giving you strange feedback, check for a repeated letter.

The reverse is a good test of an idea. If you suspect a word has two copies of a letter, such as in FLOOR or ABBEY, guess a word with two copies. Two yellows or greens confirm it.

05The trap in hard mode

Hard mode forces you to use every hint, and that creates a famous trap. Suppose you have found _IGHT. Light, might, night, right, sight, tight and fight all fit, and in hard mode you have to guess one of them. Each wrong guess only rules out one word, so you can burn all your tries.

In normal mode you would escape by guessing a word like FLAME that does not fit but tests F, L, M and so on in one go. In hard mode that is not allowed, so the lesson is to avoid the trap earlier. When your pattern has only one unknown letter and many words fit, think ahead before locking in greens. And if you want the extra challenge, accept that some words are partly luck.

Hard mode is optional in Word Guess and can be switched on before each word.

06Other languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch

The method is the same, but the letters change. In German the most common letters are E, N, I, R and S, with T, A and H not far behind, and words often end in -EN or -ER, so a first guess ending with those letters can be productive. You do not need to type umlauts: use the plain vowel and the game shows the correct spelling.

In French, E and A dominate, followed by S, I, R, N and T, and many words end in -E or -ES. In Spanish, A, E, O, S, R and N are the workhorses, and since most words end in a vowel or in S, it pays to test the last position early. Italian is vowel-rich: A, I, O and E all appear constantly, along with R, N, L and T, and most words end in a vowel. Dutch leans on E, N, A, T, R and I, with IJ and double vowels like AA, EE and OO common.

These are tendencies, not rules, and the lists here are everyday words rather than a full dictionary, so use them as a starting point and let the colours correct you. The Word Guess game page has a short note in each language if you want the native names for the game.

07Playing 4 and 6 letter words

With four letters there are far fewer words, so a guess carries more weight and a pattern like _ORE leaves many candidates (BORE, CORE, FORE, MORE, PORE, SORE, TORE, WORE). The same trap appears early, so try to use consonant-rich guesses to separate the first letters.

With six letters there are more positions to place letters, but also more ways to group letters into endings such as -ING, -ED, -ER or -LY. Use the early guesses to test those common endings, then work on the middle. The six tries stay the same, so it is not harder because you have fewer attempts per letter, but because the space of words is bigger.

08Word Guess compared with Wordle and Hangman

Wordle-style games and Hangman both ask you to find a hidden word, but they reward different things. In Hangman you reveal one letter at a time and each guess is tiny. In a Wordle-style game every guess is a whole word and you learn about five letters and their positions at once, so the game rewards planning more than vocabulary. Compared with the original Wordle, Word Guess offers the same feedback with more languages, three lengths and unlimited play, and it is an independent game with no link to the original.

09A short routine for every game

Here is a routine that works in any language and length. It will not win every game, but it avoids the common mistakes.

• Open with the same strong guess every time: five different common letters.
• Use guess two to test five new letters if the first told you little.
• From guess three on, write out the pattern with green letters in place and the yellow letters listed as must-haves.
• Count how many words could fit. If several do, pick the guess that separates them best, even if it is not itself a candidate.
• Save the last two guesses for real candidates only.
• After the game, look at how the word was spelled, especially accents and doubles.