How to Play Wordle

The Basic Rules

You get six tries to guess a hidden five-letter word. Every guess has to be a real word — the game won't accept random letter strings. After each guess, every letter in your row changes color to tell you something about that letter's place in the answer:

• A
  Green means that letter is correct and sitting in the right spot.
• B
  Yellow means the letter is somewhere in the word, just not in that position.
• C
  Grey means that letter isn't in the word at all.

Guess the word in six rows or fewer and you win. Run out of rows and the answer is revealed, no penalty beyond a broken streak.

Repeated Letters Trip People Up

If a letter appears twice in your guess but only once in the answer, only one of those tiles lights up — the other goes grey. Say the answer is SPEED and you guess ERASE: the game checks each letter against how many times it actually shows up, not just whether it exists anywhere in the word. This is the single most common source of confusion, so if a color pattern looks wrong, check whether you repeated a letter before assuming the game made a mistake.

A Full Example Round

Say the hidden word is CRISP. Here's how a typical round might unfold:

The point of that middle step isn't the specific letters — it's the habit: treat every guess as new information that can overturn what you thought you knew, not just extra confirmation.

Where Wordle Comes From

Wordle was created by software engineer Josh Wardle and first shared publicly in late 2021. The New York Times acquired it in 2022 and has run it daily since, with every player around the world getting the same word each day — puzzle numbers count up from the game's original launch, which is why today's puzzle carries a specific number rather than just a date.

Hard Mode, Explained

Turn on Hard Mode in settings and any hint you've already earned becomes mandatory to use — a green letter has to stay in that position in every later guess, and a yellow letter has to appear somewhere in your next guess. It doesn't make the puzzle's answer any different, it just removes the option of throwing out a fresh, unrelated word to test new letters once you've already confirmed some. Most players find it sharpens the middle of the game more than the opening, since your first guess is unaffected either way.

Scoring, Streaks, and Stats

Wordle doesn't have a points system — your result is simply the number of guesses it took, shown as a grid of colored squares you can share. The game does track a running streak (consecutive days you've solved it), your longest streak ever, and a breakdown of how many puzzles you've finished in 1 through 6 guesses. Missing a day resets the current streak but doesn't erase your historical stats, and playing on the web versus the app uses the same saved progress as long as you're logged into the same account.

Mistakes Beginners Usually Make

• Reusing a grey letter by accident. Once a letter has come back grey, it isn't in the word — guessing another word that repeats it wastes a full turn.
• Ignoring letter position for yellow tiles. A yellow tile means the letter is somewhere else in the word, not that exact spot — re-guessing it in the same position will come back yellow again, not green.
• Playing it too safe on guess two. Sticking with familiar-feeling words instead of a guess built from entirely untested letters usually means more rows used than necessary.
• Forgetting repeated letters exist. If a word has a letter twice, the color feedback follows the actual count in the answer, not just whether the letter shows up anywhere — see the repeated-letters section above.

Playing on Mobile vs. Desktop

The rules don't change between devices, but the experience does. On a phone, the on-screen keyboard sits right under the board, so most players type with their thumbs and watch the colors update in real time without much scrolling. On desktop, typing with a physical keyboard is faster, and the board tends to feel larger relative to the screen, which makes it easier to scan several rows of past guesses at once when you're deep into elimination. If you play both, your saved progress and streak carry over as long as you're signed into the same account — the game syncs through your browser or the app rather than storing anything locally per device.

Why Puzzles Are Numbered, Not Just Dated

Every Wordle puzzle carries a number instead of just a date because the count started from the game's original launch under creator Josh Wardle, long before the New York Times took it over. That numbering stuck even after the acquisition, which is why a page might reference "puzzle #1909" rather than only "September 10, 2026" — the number is a fixed, permanent identifier for that specific word, while the date can occasionally shift by a day depending on which time zone a player is in relative to when the puzzle resets at midnight local time.

Accessibility Settings Worth Knowing

Wordle includes a color-blind friendly mode in its settings menu that swaps the green-and-yellow scheme for an orange-and-blue one, which is easier to distinguish for the most common forms of color vision deficiency. There's also a "hard contrast" theme option for dark mode that increases the visual separation between tile states. Both settings are purely visual — they don't change gameplay, scoring, or how guesses are validated, so turning them on or off has zero effect on your streak or stats.