How Wordle works

The basic rules

Every day, the New York Times picks a five-letter English word. Your job is to figure out what it is in six guesses or fewer. Each guess has to be a real five-letter word — you can’t type random letters. If you try something that isn’t in Wordle’s dictionary, the row shakes and the guess doesn’t count.

After each valid guess, the five tiles turn one of three colors. Those colors are how Wordle communicates which letters are correct.

What the tile colors mean

• Green. The letter is in the answer and in the right position. Lock it in — subsequent guesses should keep that letter at that slot.
• Yellow. The letter is in the answer, but at a different position. You need that letter, just not where you put it.
• Gray. The letter isn’t in the answer at all. Skip it on your next guess.

The one wrinkle is double letters. If you guess a word with two of the same letter and the answer has only one, the first occurrence will turn green or yellow and the second will turn gray. That second gray doesn’t mean the letter isn’t used — it means it isn’t used twice.

The keyboard

Below the grid, Wordle shows an on-screen keyboard. The keys change color to match the highest-confidence color you’ve seen for each letter so far. Eliminated letters (gray) are the easiest to use — the keyboard tells you at a glance which letters you don’t need to consider in your next guess. You don’t have to use the on-screen keyboard; type on your actual keyboard and the colors update the same way.

Winning, losing, and the share grid

If a row turns all green, you win. The game shows you a celebration animation and lets you share your result. The share grid is the iconic feature — a compact grid of colored squares (no letters revealed) that you can paste into any chat to show your group how you did without spoiling the answer for anyone who hasn’t played yet.

If you use all six guesses without finding the word, you lose. Wordle shows you what the answer was, your streak breaks, and you start over tomorrow. Losing happens. The game is designed to be hard enough that some days the community average is closer to five guesses than three.

Hard mode

Wordle has a hard-mode toggle in settings. Hard mode adds two rules: any green letter you’ve revealed must stay in the same slot in subsequent guesses, and any yellow letter must appear somewhere in subsequent guesses. It forbids the “burn a turn for information” play that some advanced solvers rely on. The full case for and against it lives on the hard-mode page.

When the puzzle resets

The Wordle answer changes once a day at local midnight (Eastern Time, since the NYT runs the game out of New York). Everyone in the same time zone plays the same word; people ahead in the day are seeing tomorrow’s puzzle relative to people behind. The streak counter goes up by one each day you solve before midnight; missing a day breaks the streak.

That’s the entire game. The strategy that wins it consistently lives in our strategy guide.