Wordle is a word guessing game that's captured the attention of the internet, especially those on social media. Maybe you’ve been wondering what the graphs of green and yellow squares flooding your Twitter are and want a piece of the action. Or perhaps you’re tired of the humble brags from friends and want in on the bragging rights that come with a second-guess solution. Either way, you’re likely trying to figure out the best way to start your own solve streak.
The best comparison to Wordle is Hangman, though you get far fewer guesses, as you’ll lose if you don’t guess the complete full word in six tries. Fortunately, you are restricted to five-letter words only, which will make your guessing go a bit more smoothly. Here are some tips to help you along.
10 Make It Harder On Yourself
This tip is debatable, and really comes down to your personal style, but many Wordle Warriors are firm believers in turning on Hard Mode. With this feature enabled, you will be forced to use your correct letters in your next guess, or it will reject your word as a potential guess.
While this may seem like a common sense thing to do, some like to have the option to guess completely different letters on their second guess, regardless of correct letters in the first to rule out (or confirm) as many letters as possible by row three.
9 Pick Your Starting Word
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Find a word that you’re comfortable with, and make that your first guess every day. Eventually, it has to be the word of the day, so that’ll give you a first guess brag, but it also gives you a pattern to get in the right frame of mind for each puzzle.
You’ll want to pick a word that has multiple vowels and common consonants in it. For example, some like to start every Wordle with ‘mouse’, letting them know straight away if the word will have up to three vowels.
8 A, E, I, O, U
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If you’ve picked a strong start word with as many vowels as possible, and you’ve gotten the little green and yellow boxes around those vowels, your next step is making sure you know their place.
Use your second guess to find where all your vowels go in the Wordle. You might find that U, S, and E are all correct, but yellow. This time around you could try ‘fuels’ to see if any turn green.
7 Wheel Of Fortune Letters
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You know the final round of Wheel of Fortune when they give you some of the letters in the word to help you solve? Take note of those letters, and keep them in mind while playing Wordle.
R, S, T, L, N, and E are all heavily used letters in the alphabet, so any five letter guesses with those in it will propel you towards a fast solution. For example, if you used ‘fuels’ as your second guess, it contains S, L, and E, which is half of those suggested.
6 Remember Letter Pairings
If you know for sure the Wordle has a letter like S in it, think about the letters often paired with it in words. T, H, or even E are common with words like ‘shout’ or ‘stole’. Ultimately with this one, you’ll want to remember ‘sh’, ‘st’, ‘es’, ‘ed’, ‘ds’, etc.
If your second guess is ‘fuels’, but the L is wrong and the other letters need rearranging, you could try ‘feuds’ as your third guess.
5 And Sometimes Y
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Though not often, Y can be a vowel in the English language. Once you’ve exhausted all your vowels and find you’re missing one to connect two consonants, try using Y.
Words like ‘early’, ‘ready’, and ‘heavy’ all feature the Y vowel, and can easily throw you off if you’re locked in thinking your vowels are used up. Instead of ‘ready’, you may put ‘reads’, which could cost you the day’s game if you’re already on your last guess.
4 Seeing Double
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A commonly forgotten rule is that you CAN use a letter twice. If, for example, you guessed ‘heavy’ and the Y isn’t acting as a vowel for it, the word very likely could be ‘heave’, you’re just overlooking the duplicate letter E.
This is tricky, however, because duplicate letters don’t happen in Wordle often enough to make this a priority rule when playing, but definitely keep it in the back of your mind, especially when you’ve pulled out the letter Y and still can’t solve the word.
3 Don’t Second Guess Yourself
Obviously, there’s a strategy to Wordle, and you want to make sure you’re thinking critically about the words you guess, but don’t overthink. Often the easier word option is the correct one, so second-guessing that ‘light’ would be far too easy will lead you to waste a precious guess on a word like ‘litho’ which will almost never be the correct answer to anything.
There may come a time when the more complex word IS correct, but at least you’ll know the easier word is wrong before you convince yourself it is without ever trying it.
2 Use Outside Help
Only use this as an absolute last resort, simply because it takes the fun out of solving the Wordle on your own, but you can always look up five-letter words on Google. If you know it begins with ‘TE’ but you have gone through three guesses without any luck, a quick Google search of words starting with ‘TE’ will give you probable words to guess.
Keeping in mind what letter options you have left on the keyboard, as well as the other tips listed above, you have a fairly good shot at picking the right one to solve the puzzle.
1 Be Considerate Of Others
The best and quickest way to upset the entire Wordle community online is to post your solved Wordle graph. We all want to show off our easy win (or lament overthinking it and getting it wrong, or barely getting it right), but remember to only share the stats page that the website gives you after you win.
No one likes spoilers, be it a book, movie, or game, so don’t be a spoil-sport and ruin everyone’s fun just to brag about guessing ‘knoll’ correctly.