Five-letter word guessing strategy: openers, clues, and traps

Guessing a five-letter word in six tries is part vocabulary and part information game. Each guess tells you something about all five letters, so the best players choose words that reveal as much as possible. Here are the strategies that make the biggest difference.

Pick an opening word that tests common letters

Your first guess has no information to work with, so its job is to learn. In English, letters like E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, and N appear in a large share of words, while J, Q, X, and Z are rare. An opening word built from five different common letters, such as "SLATE", "CRANE", or "RAISE", tests several likely letters at once, including a mix of vowels and consonants.

Avoid repeating a letter in your first guess, since a duplicate spends a slot testing a letter you've already tested.

Use your second guess to cover new ground

If your first guess revealed only one or two letters, a second guess with five completely new common letters often teaches you more than trying to place the letters you've found. For example, following "SLATE" with "CORNY" tests ten different letters across two guesses. After that, you'll usually have enough information to start narrowing in.

Respect every clue

Once you're trying to solve, use everything you know:

• Keep green letters in their positions.
• Move yellow letters to a new position. A yellow letter is in the word, but definitely not where you put it.
• Don't reuse gray letters. They're not in the answer.

It's surprisingly easy to lose track, especially of which positions a yellow letter has already been tried in. Pausing to list the possibilities before each guess prevents wasted turns.

Think about letter patterns

English words follow patterns. Many five-letter words end in common endings like -ER, -ED, -LY, -CH, -SH, or -TH, and some letter pairs rarely appear together. If you know the word has an H in the last position, for example, CH, SH, and TH endings are good bets.

Don't forget double letters

Answers can contain the same letter twice, as in "APPLE", "SPEED", or "LLAMA". If you're stuck with only a few known letters and no word seems to fit, consider that one of them might appear twice. When you guess a word with a repeated letter, each copy is scored separately, so the colors also tell you how many times the letter appears.

Beware of the trap of too many options

Sometimes you'll know four letters and have many candidates for the fifth, such as _IGHT, which could be LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT, or FIGHT. Guessing them one at a time can run you out of turns. A smarter move is often a guess that tests several of the possible first letters at once, like "FLIRT" or "MOTHS", even though it can't be the answer. It sacrifices one guess to guarantee the next.

Play every day

The daily word guess puzzle gives everyone the same word, with a new one each day at midnight UTC. Your progress is saved in your browser, so you can come back to it later in the day.