Wordle

Overview

Wordle is the now-iconic word-guessing game in which you have six tries to identify a hidden five-letter word. After each guess, every letter is colour-coded: green for "correct letter in the correct position", yellow for "correct letter in the wrong position", and grey for "not in the word at all". The cumulative feedback rapidly narrows the search space.

This implementation gives you a fresh target word each session, drawn from a curated answer pool. The game preserves the spirit of the original: hard mode disables guesses that contradict prior hints, the keyboard tracks letter status as you go, and statistics persist in browser storage so you can chart your win rate and guess distribution.

How it works

Each guess is matched against the target one letter at a time. Green positions are computed first, then yellow positions look at the remaining unmatched letters in the target — this two-pass logic is what handles the corner case where the guess has more copies of a letter than the target. For example, if the target is ROBOT and the guess is BOOMS, the first O is green and the second O is grey, not yellow.

Optimal first guesses maximise expected information. Words like CRANE, SLATE, ROATE, and ADIEU rank highly because they cover frequent letters and minimise the average number of remaining candidates after the feedback. Solving optimally from any starting position is a tree-search problem — the answer-pool average for the best policies is around 3.4 guesses per puzzle.

Examples

• Guess CRANE against target SHARE: A and E are green, R is yellow (correct letter, wrong position), C and N are grey.
• Guess LEVEL against target EERIE: the first E is yellow, the second E is green, the third E is grey (target only has two Es).
• A typical solve sequence: guess 1 covers 5 common letters, guess 2 confirms or rejects them, guesses 3-4 narrow to a small set, guesses 5-6 land the answer.
• Hard mode forces every subsequent guess to be consistent with all prior feedback — no probing guesses allowed.

FAQ

How many guesses do I get?
Six. Run out of guesses and the round ends with a loss.

What's hard mode?
Hard mode requires every subsequent guess to use the green and yellow letters you've already learned. It eliminates information-gathering guesses.

Is the answer always a common word?
Yes — the answer pool is curated for vocabulary level so obscure words don't appear as targets, even if they're accepted as guesses.

Can the same letter appear twice in the target?
Yes — repeated letters are common (BOOMS, LEVEL, ANNAL).

What's a good average guess count?
3.5-4.0 guesses per win is strong; many solvers average 4.5 with consistent winning percentages.

Try Wordle