Daily Word Guess

Guess the hidden word. Pick four, five or six letters with the buttons above the grid, and each length is its own puzzle with its own answer for the day. Four letters gives you five attempts, five and six letters give you six. After each guess every tile changes colour to tell you how close you were.

Teal means that letter is correct and sitting in the right position. Pink means the letter appears in the word but you have put it somewhere else. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all.

Repeated letters are handled honestly. If the answer contains one E and your guess contains two, only one of them will light up. The other stays grey, which tells you something useful rather than misleading you.

Every guess has to be a real word from the dictionary. That is a constraint rather than an annoyance: it stops people burning a turn on random letters and it makes the puzzle a test of vocabulary rather than brute force.

1. Spend the first guess on information, not on winning. A first guess that shares no letters with a second guess covers a large slice of the alphabet in two moves. Openers packed with common letters tell you more than a lucky stab: ARISEN, TAILOR or SENIOR at six, CRANE, SLATE or AROSE at five, and LATE or RAIN at four.

2. Vowels first, but not all of them. Most answers carry two or three vowels at six letters and one or two at four. Covering A, E and one of I, O or U inside the first two guesses narrows the field sharply. Spending a whole guess on a vowel-heavy word like AUDIOS wastes the consonants.

3. A pink tile is worth more than a teal one. A teal tile fixes a letter in place. A pink tile tells you the letter is present and rules out a position, which is two pieces of information from one tile. When you are choosing between guesses, prefer the one that moves your pink letters somewhere new.

4. Watch the endings. Longer words end in a small number of predictable ways. ING, ERS, EST, ION and OUS cover a large share of the six letter pool. If you have a pink G and a pink N, try them at the end before anywhere else. At four letters the endings matter less and the vowel in the middle matters more.

5. Do not chase a single pattern too early. Testing a family of similar words one at a time is the slowest possible approach, and it is what makes four letters deceptively hard: _ALL, _ILL and _ACK each hide a dozen candidates and you only have five tries. A guess that splits the remaining candidates roughly in half beats a guess that confirms one of them.

If you want to see which words are still possible after a few guesses, the word finder will search by what a word starts with, ends with or contains, and the word unscrambler will show every word hiding in a set of letters.

Guesses are validated against the same open English word list behind the unscrambler and the word lists on this site, so anything valid here is valid there. That is 5,457 four letter words, 12,566 at five and 22,336 at six.

Answers are drawn from a much smaller pool: a thousand at each length, chosen by how often the word actually turns up in written English rather than by whether it is in the dictionary. Plurals that are just a common word with an S on the end were removed, because guessing those is unsatisfying, and so were given names, which are not really words you can reason your way to. A thousand a length is nearly three years of daily puzzles before any of them repeats.

Nothing you type is sent anywhere. The puzzle runs entirely in your browser, and your streak lives in your own browser storage rather than on a server.