How to Play Wordle: Rules, Colors and Tips (Plus a Free Daily Word)

To play Wordle, you guess a secret five-letter word in six tries or fewer. Type any real five-letter English word and press Enter. Each letter tile then turns a color: green means the letter is in the word and in the right spot, yellow means the letter is in the word but in a different spot, and gray means the letter is not in the word at all. Use those clues to make a better guess on the next row, and keep going until all five tiles are green or your six guesses run out.

That is the whole game in one paragraph, and it is why millions of people play it every morning. The details still matter, though: how colors work when a word has two of the same letter, which words the game accepts, what hard mode changes, and how to share a result without spoiling it for friends. This guide covers all of it, walks through a full example game row by row, and shows you where to play a free daily word game of the same kind right here on 77.today.

Wordle rules, step by step

The New York Times version of Wordle and most games built on the same idea, including our Daily Word, follow the same core rules.

1. There is one secret word per day. It has exactly five letters, and every player gets the same word on the same day. That shared puzzle is what makes comparing results with friends fun.
2. You have six rows, so six guesses. Each row holds one five-letter guess. You cannot skip a row or take back a guess once it is submitted.
3. Type a real word and press Enter. Use your physical keyboard or the on-screen keyboard. The game checks your guess against its word list; if the word is not accepted, the row shakes or stays blank and you lose nothing. Try another word.
4. Read the colors. After you submit, each tile flips to green, yellow or gray. The on-screen keyboard also colors the letters you have used, so you can see at a glance which letters are confirmed, which are misplaced and which are dead.
5. Guess again using what you learned. Keep green letters where they are, move yellow letters to new positions, and avoid gray letters.
6. Win or lose. The game ends when all five tiles in a row are green, or when the sixth row is used without a full green row. Either way, the answer is revealed and you wait for the next puzzle.

A few things are not in the rules but trip up new players. Your first guess does not need to be a clever word; it is simply your first question. You are allowed to use letters you already know are gray (except in hard mode, more on that below), and sometimes doing so is smart. And there is no timer: you can stare at the board for an hour before typing your third guess.

What the Wordle colors mean

The three colors are simple on their own. The table below adds what each one should mean for your next guess, which is where beginners gain the most.

Tile color	What it tells you	What to do next
Green	The letter is in the answer, in exactly this position.	Keep it in this spot (or, early on, test other letters around it).
Yellow	The letter is in the answer, but not in this position.	Move it. It must appear somewhere else in the word, never in this slot.
Gray	The letter is not in the answer (or not in it as many times as you typed it; see repeated letters below).	Stop using it in candidate words.

A yellow tile carries two pieces of information, and many players only use one. It says the letter is in the word, and it also says the letter is not in that particular position. If you guessed STARE and the R came back yellow, the answer has an R, but not as its fourth letter. Over several guesses, yellow tiles in different spots can pin a letter down by elimination.

Repeated letters: how two of the same letter are colored

Words with a doubled letter, such as SPEED, ROBOT or ABBEY, are where the color rules confuse people. The standard rule, used by the New York Times game and by our Daily Word, works in two passes:

1. Greens first. Every letter that sits in exactly the right spot turns green, and that copy of the letter in the answer is used up.
2. Then yellows, only as many as are left. Going left to right, a remaining letter turns yellow only if the answer still has an unmatched copy of it. Once those copies run out, any extra copies in your guess turn gray.

In plain terms: the game never shows more green and yellow tiles for a letter than the answer actually contains. Here are four real cases worked out with that rule.

Answer	Your guess	Colors, letter by letter	Why
CRANE	EERIE	E gray, E gray, R yellow, I gray, E green	CRANE has one E. The last E is in the right spot, so it takes the only copy; the other two E tiles turn gray.
ROBOT	FLOOR	F gray, L gray, O yellow, O green, R yellow	The fourth-letter O matches exactly. ROBOT still has a second O (second position), so the other O turns yellow.
SPEED	ERASE	E yellow, R gray, A gray, S yellow, E yellow	SPEED has two E's and neither is matched exactly, so both E's in ERASE turn yellow.
ABBEY	BOBBY	B yellow, O gray, B green, B gray, Y green	ABBEY has two B's. One is matched exactly (third spot), the first B uses the second copy as a yellow, and the third B has nothing left, so it is gray.

Two practical lessons follow. First, a gray tile does not always mean the letter is absent. If the same letter shows green or yellow elsewhere in that row, the gray only means there is no additional copy. Second, if a letter shows as both green and yellow in the same row, the answer contains that letter at least twice.

Which words are valid in Wordle?

There are really two word lists in a Wordle-style game, and it helps to know the difference.

Allowed guesses are any words the game accepts when you press Enter. This list is large and includes plenty of obscure words. You will never be told a guess is wrong for being unusual, only for not being a word the game recognizes. Strings of random letters such as AEIOU are rejected.

Possible answers are a much smaller, curated set of everyday words. According to the New York Times help center, daily Wordle words are curated by editors using the Oxford Dictionary. The NYT also states clear limits on plurals and past tenses: a plural can be an answer only if forming it changes the root word (GEESE can be an answer; DATES and BOXES cannot), and a past-tense verb can be an answer only if it is not formed by simply adding ED (FRIED and SPENT can be answers; HOPED cannot).

Our Daily Word works the same way in spirit. You can guess any real English word from a large, open word list (the public-domain ENABLE list), while the answers are always common, everyday words from a set of about 1,500+. Answers are never names, never plurals and never offensive words. That means a guess like TOWNS is allowed as a probe, but you can rule out a plural as the final answer.

Wordle hard mode, explained

The New York Times game has a setting called hard mode, found under the gear icon. The official description is short: any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. In practice that means:

• A green letter must stay in the same position in every later guess.
• A yellow letter must appear somewhere in every later guess.
• You can no longer play a "burner" word full of fresh letters to test as many new letters as possible.

Hard mode changes how you think rather than how the board looks. It rewards careful reasoning about which word fits every clue so far, and it punishes guessing families of near-identical words, which we cover in our Wordle strategy guide. Our Daily Word does not have a hard mode switch; you are always free to choose your own approach, and you can simply play it the hard-mode way if you like the extra challenge.

A worked example game, guess by guess

Here is a complete four-guess game with the answer PLANT. Read each row as a conversation: you ask a question with your guess, and the colors answer it.

Guess	Word	Colors, letter by letter	What we learned
1	ADIEU	A yellow, D gray, I gray, E gray, U gray	There is an A, but not first. D, I, E and U are out, so the word probably leans on A as its main vowel.
2	CLASP	C gray, L green, A green, S gray, P yellow	The word is _LA__. P is in it but not last, so P must be first or fourth. C and S are out.
3	PLANK	P green, L green, A green, N green, K gray	PLAN_ is locked in. PLANE is impossible because E is gray, so the last letter is not K or E.
4	PLANT	All five green	Solved in four.

Notice what happened on guess three. After CLASP, the realistic candidates were PLANK and PLANT (PLANE was already ruled out by the gray E, and PLANS is a plural). Guessing one of them was a coin flip. A sharper player could have used a word containing both K and T to settle it in one go, but with three guesses still in hand, the coin flip was perfectly safe. Knowing when you can afford a gamble and when you cannot is the heart of good play.

How to share your Wordle results without spoilers

Sharing is half the fun. When you finish, the game offers a share button that copies a small grid of colored squares to your clipboard: one row per guess, showing only colors and no letters. You can paste it into a text message, a group chat, email or social media. Friends see that you solved it in three or five guesses and how your clues developed, but they do not see the word.

A few habits keep you on good terms with your group:

• Paste the grid, not a screenshot. A screenshot shows the letters and spoils the puzzle.
• Do not hint in the caption. "Tricky double letter today!" is a spoiler for some players.
• Wait until the next puzzle before talking about the answer, since players in other time zones may not have played yet.

Our Daily Word has the same kind of share button. It copies only the colored grid and the puzzle number, never the letters.

Streaks and stats

Both games track your history. The New York Times statistics page shows Played, Win %, Current Streak and Max Streak, plus a bar chart of how many guesses your wins took. A streak counts consecutive wins, and the NYT notes that a puzzle must be solved before midnight local time to count; a new Wordle appears at midnight in your own time zone. A loss resets the current streak to zero, while your max streak is kept as a record.

Daily Word shows the same four numbers: played, win percentage, current streak and best streak. The difference is where they live. Daily Word keeps your stats in your browser, so there is no account to create, but if you clear your browser data or switch to a different phone, your history does not follow you. Our new word arrives at midnight New York time (ET) for everyone, so a player in California gets it at 9 p.m. Pacific the evening before.

Common beginner mistakes

• Ignoring the "not here" half of yellow. If E was yellow in the second position, do not put E back in the second position. It wastes a slot that could test something new.
• Reusing gray letters by accident. Glance at the on-screen keyboard before every guess. Typing a dead letter is the most common way to waste a row.
• Chasing one letter at a time. When you know four letters, such as _IGHT, it is tempting to try LIGHT, then MIGHT, then NIGHT. With six candidates and three guesses left, that can lose the game. A word that tests several of the possible first letters at once is safer.
• Forgetting double letters. Answers like APPLE, SPEED or FLOOR are common. If you have checked many letters and nothing fits, consider that a known letter appears twice.
• Guessing plurals as answers. Plurals like TOWNS can be useful tests, but they are not answers.
• Rushing. There is no clock. Spending thirty seconds listing possible words before guess four often saves a whole row.

A short history of Wordle

Wordle was made by Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, and the name is a play on his surname. He released the game to the public in October 2021. Its growth was remarkable even by internet standards: according to The New York Times Company, 90 people played on November 1, 2021, and nearly two months later about 300,000 people were playing. By early 2022 it had millions of daily players, helped by the spoiler-free colored grids that filled social feeds.

On January 31, 2022, The New York Times announced that it had acquired Wordle for a price "in the low seven figures," promising that the game would remain free to play for new and existing players at the time it moved. Wardle said the Times games had played a big part in the game's origins, so the move felt natural to him. The NYT help center notes that its editors began curating the daily answers in November 2022, and subscribers can now play an archive reaching back to June 19, 2021.

Today Wordle sits alongside the Crossword, Spelling Bee and other games in the NYT Games lineup, and its simple format has inspired many similar games in other languages and themes. If you enjoy the format, our roundup of games like Wordle collects the best of them.

How to play Daily Word on 77.today for free

Daily Word is 77.today's own free word game in the same five-letter, six-guess format. Daily Word #1 goes live on October 18, 2026, and a new word appears every day at midnight New York time.

1. Open 77.today/daily-word on your phone or computer. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
2. Type a five-letter word with your keyboard or the on-screen QWERTY keys and press Enter.
3. Read the tiles: green for the right letter in the right spot, yellow for a letter that belongs elsewhere, gray for a letter that is not in the word. The keyboard colors update too.
4. Solve it within six guesses. When the game ends, you see the word with a short meaning, your stats and your streak.
5. Tap share to copy your colored grid, with no letters and no spoilers, and send it to friends.

Here is how it compares with the New York Times game on the points players ask about most.

Feature	Daily Word (77.today)	Wordle (The New York Times)
Price	Free, no sign-up	Daily puzzle free; full features for subscribers
New puzzle	Midnight New York time (ET), same moment for everyone	Midnight in your local time zone
Guesses	6	6
Hard mode	No (play it that way by choice)	Yes, optional setting
Answers	Common everyday words; no names, plurals or offensive words	Curated by NYT editors; most plain plurals and -ED past tenses excluded
Stats	Played, win %, current and best streak, saved in your browser	Played, win %, current and max streak, guess distribution, tied to an NYT account
Archive or replays	No, one puzzle a day	Archive for subscribers

Once you know the rules, the next step is getting faster. Start with our data-backed list of the best Wordle starting words, then read the Wordle strategy guide for second-guess logic and the trap words that break streaks. If you like a bigger grid, try the daily crossword or a round of sudoku, all in our puzzles section.

Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company. 77.today and Daily Word are not affiliated with or endorsed by The New York Times.