How to Play Wordle — The Complete Beginner’s Guide

Wordle is a daily word puzzle with one job: guess the five-letter word in six tries or fewer. Millions of people play it every morning with coffee. If you’re new, this page teaches you the rules in about five minutes, walks you through a real example, and gives you the beginner habits that actually matter. I play every day and write hints for a living; everything below is the stuff I wish someone had told me on day one.

The Rules in 60 Seconds

1. You get 6 guesses to find a 5-letter word.
2. Every guess must be a valid English word. The game rejects gibberish.
3. After each guess, the tiles change color to show how close you are.
4. One puzzle per day. Everyone on Earth gets the same word.
5. A new puzzle appears at midnight local time.

That’s the whole game. The colors are where the strategy lives, so let’s get those exactly right.

What the Colors Mean

After each guess, every tile turns one of three colors:

• Green: the letter is in the word AND in the right spot. Lock it in and keep it there.
• Yellow: the letter is in the word but in the WRONG spot. Move it somewhere new next guess.
• Gray: the letter is not in the word at all, with one exception below. Stop using it.

The Gray Exception

If you guess a letter twice and the answer contains it once, one tile gets colored and the extra copy turns gray. So gray doesn’t always mean “absent.” It can mean “already accounted for.” This trips up beginners constantly, and it’s worth re-reading: a gray tile on a doubled letter tells you the letter appears exactly once, which is useful information, not a dead end.

A Worked Example: Three Guesses

Let’s play a sample game. The answer here is FOCUS (a simplified illustration of how the logic flows).

Guess 1: DRAIN. All five tiles go gray. D, R, A, I, N are all out. Feels terrible, teaches a lot: five common letters eliminated in a single row.

Guess 2: COULD. C yellow (in the word, not position 1), O green (position 2, locked), U yellow (in the word, not position 3), L gray, D gray. Now you know the shape: _ O _ _ _, with C and U somewhere in it.

Guess 3: FOCUS. The O_U backbone plus fresh consonants F and S. C slides into position 3, U into 4. All green. Solved in 3.

Notice the discipline: yellows moved every time, the green O never moved, and no gray letter was ever reused. Green means keep, yellow means move, gray means discard. That’s the entire game.

Where to Play (and What to Avoid)

The official Wordle lives at nytimes.com/games/wordle. It’s free in any browser, desktop or mobile, no download and no account required. It’s also inside the New York Times Games app (iOS and Android), free even without a Games subscription.

Skip the app-store clones. They aren’t affiliated with The New York Times, they’re often full of ads and trackers, and some use inaccurate word lists that make the game behave differently from the real one. If the URL isn’t nytimes.com, it isn’t Wordle.

The Account Question: Sign In or Not?

You can play Wordle forever without an account. But your streak and statistics live in your browser, which means clearing site data, switching devices, or losing your phone can wipe them. Signing in with a free NYT account syncs your stats and protects your streak across devices. If your streak matters to you, sign in before you need to, not after something breaks. And if your streak already reset unfairly, here’s how to fix a reset Wordle streak.

Hard Mode in 30 Seconds

Hard mode adds one rule: any hint you reveal must be used in every later guess. Green A in position 3 means every future guess has A in position 3. It removes your best recovery tool (the information-burn guess), so learn normal mode first. Full breakdown in our Wordle Hard Mode guide.

Wordle O’Clock: Fitting It Into the NYT Games Morning

Wordle takes most players 3 to 10 minutes, which makes it the anchor of a bigger routine. Here’s the order I recommend once the basics click:

1. Wordle first (5 min). Your brain is freshest, and the letter warm-up helps everything after.
2. Connections (5–10 min). Group the 16 words while your pattern brain is awake.
3. Strands (5–10 min). The theme hunt uses the same “letters to words” muscle.
4. Spelling Bee (10–15 min). Settle in; this one rewards patience.
5. Mini Crossword (1–2 min). The victory lap.

Thirty minutes, five games, one streak across all of them. That’s the routine behind every hints page on this site, and it’s why our Connections hints and Spelling Bee answers read like they were written by someone who just played. They were.

7 Beginner Tips That Actually Work

Start with a vowel-balanced word. SLATE, CRANE, and TRACE are popular openers because they test common letters in common positions. Data-backed rankings: best Wordle starting words.

Never reuse a gray letter. The number one beginner error. Gray means eliminated. Every repeat is a burned guess.

Move every yellow, every guess. A yellow letter sitting in the same spot twice is a wasted turn. Force it somewhere new without exception.

Think in families, not words. If you have O_U with F, C, S untested, list the family (FOCUS, LOCUS, HOCUS) instead of guessing blindly.

Use guess 5 to think, not to gamble. Two candidates left? Play a word that tests the letter distinguishing them, then solve on guess 6.

Assume the double. About one in three answers repeats a letter. Four placed letters and nothing fits? The answer repeats one.

Play every day. Pattern recognition is a muscle. Two weeks of daily play teaches more than any guide, including this one.

5 Mistakes Every Beginner Makes

Reusing gray letters. Worth saying twice, because everyone does it under pressure.

Leaving yellows in place. Yellow means right letter, wrong spot. Both halves of that clue matter.

Trying to solve on guess 2. Guess 2 is for information, not glory. Two elimination guesses beat four hopeful stabs.

Forgetting double letters. Beginners almost never consider the repeat. One in three answers has one. Consider it early.

Panicking after an all-gray opener. Five common letters eliminated in one row is enormous progress. It doesn’t feel like it, but the math says otherwise.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Wordle free?

Yes. The daily Wordle is completely free on the NYT Games site and app, no subscription needed and no account required.

What time does Wordle reset?

Midnight in your local time zone. Everyone gets the same word each day, and there’s no way to replay the current puzzle on the official site.

Can I play past Wordles?

The official game only offers today’s puzzle. Our past Wordle answers archive lets you look up previous answers by date and puzzle number.

What happens if I don’t finish in 6 guesses?

The game reveals the answer and your streak resets to zero. It stings. Tomorrow is a new word.

Are Wordle answers ever plurals?

The answer list mostly avoids simple plurals, but “mostly” isn’t “never.” Use plurals as information-gathering guesses rather than final answers, and check the complete word list for what kinds of words actually appear.

Is there an official Wordle app?

No standalone app. Wordle lives in the browser at nytimes.com and inside the NYT Games app. Anything else calling itself Wordle in an app store is a clone.

Who created Wordle?

Josh Wardle, a software engineer, built it in 2021 as a gift for his partner. It went public in October 2021, grew from dozens of players to millions within months, and The New York Times acquired it in January 2022.

Ready for your first real game? Get today’s Wordle hints: 6 spoiler-free clues, the answer only if you want it. When you’re ready to level up, read the Wordle strategy guide.