Wordle

What is Wordle?

Wordle is a daily word-guessing game where you have six attempts to identify a secret five-letter word. After each guess the game gives you colour-coded feedback: a green tile means the letter is correct and in the right position, a yellow tile means the letter appears in the word but in a different spot, and a grey tile means the letter is absent entirely. Using that feedback strategically is what separates a quick solve from an agonising six-guess crawl.

A brief history

The original Wordle was created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 as a private gift for his partner, a word-game enthusiast. After sharing it with family it spread across social media through the distinctive emoji grid that players posted to show off their results without spoiling the answer. The New York Times acquired the game in January 2022 for a reported seven-figure sum, and it remains one of the most played daily word games in the world. This version is an independent homage with the same core mechanic, a fresh daily puzzle, and your own personal stats tracked locally — no account required.

How to get a good score

Opening words carry the most weight because they let you probe the most common letters in English before you have any information to work with. High-frequency letters like E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S, and L appear in a large proportion of five-letter words, so starting words that cover several of these at once — words like CRANE, STARE, AROSE, IRATE, or SLATE — give you a strong information advantage on the first guess. Avoid reusing letters you have already confirmed absent: every character slot in guesses two through six should carry new information whenever possible.

Once you have one or two confirmed letters, think about their most common positions. For example, the letter S appears most often at the start or end of English words, R and N frequently occupy the third or fourth position, and vowels cluster heavily in the second and third slots. Combining positional intuition with the colour feedback narrows the candidate list quickly. Experienced players typically solve the puzzle in three or four guesses; solving in two is rare and largely lucky; an opening ace — guessing the word on the very first try — happens roughly once every few hundred games by chance alone.

Streaks and why they matter

A streak counts the number of consecutive days on which you solved the puzzle successfully. Maintaining a long streak requires both skill and consistency — missing a day breaks it regardless of your reason, which is what gives high streaks their prestige. This version tracks your current streak, your best-ever streak, your overall win percentage, and the distribution of how many guesses it took you to win across every game you have played. All data lives only in your browser's local storage: it is private, instant, and needs no server.

Ranked vs. free play

Each calendar day brings exactly one ranked puzzle — the same word for every player who visits that day. Completing the ranked puzzle updates your streak and all statistics. Once the daily puzzle is finished you can keep playing in free-play mode with randomly chosen words; those games are unlimited and do not affect your stats, so they are ideal for practising opening strategies or just enjoying the game without the pressure of a streak on the line.

Tips for beginners

If you are new to word games, start with a five-letter word you know well that contains at least three different vowels — something like AUDIO or OUIJA — just to locate where vowels sit. Then follow up with a consonant-heavy word to fill in the structure. Do not get attached to a theory too early: if the feedback rules out your favourite candidate, abandon it immediately. The green and yellow tiles are facts; treat everything else as a hypothesis. Over time your intuition for common English word patterns will sharpen and your average guess count will drop naturally.