Wordle Unlimited

What is Wordle Unlimited?

A daily word-guessing game: six attempts to find a secret five-letter word. Each guess comes back colour-coded. Green means the letter is right and in the right place, yellow means it's in the word somewhere else, and grey means it isn't there at all. What separates a three-guess solve from an agonising six-guess crawl is entirely what you do with that feedback.

A brief history

Software engineer Josh Wardle built the original Wordle in 2021 as a private gift for his partner, who liked word games. He shared it with family, and from there it spread across social media on the back of that emoji grid people posted to brag about a result without spoiling the answer. The New York Times bought it in January 2022 for a reported seven figures, and it's still one of the most played daily word games anywhere.

This version is an independent homage — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The New York Times. Same core mechanic, our own daily word list, and your stats kept locally on your own device. No account needed.

How to get a good score

Your opening word matters more than any other, because it's the only guess you make with no information at all. E, A, R, I, O, T, N, S and L turn up in a huge share of five-letter words, so an opener that covers several at once puts you well ahead. CRANE, STARE, AROSE, IRATE and SLATE are all good for this. After that, stop reusing letters you've already ruled out. Every slot in guesses two through six should be earning you something.

Once you have a confirmed letter or two, think about where they usually sit. S tends to start or end a word. R and N like the third and fourth positions. Vowels cluster in the second and third slots. Put that together with the colours and the candidate list collapses fast.

For calibration: experienced players land it in three or four guesses most days. Two is rare and mostly luck. Getting it on the first try happens about once every few hundred games, by chance alone, so don't read anything into it when it happens.

Streaks and why they matter

A streak is the number of consecutive days you've solved the puzzle. Keeping a long one takes skill and consistency in equal measure, since missing a day breaks it no matter why you missed it. That's the whole reason a big streak means anything.

This version tracks your current streak, your best-ever streak, your win percentage, and how many guesses each of your wins took. It all lives in your browser's local storage, with no server involved.

One word a day, then unlimited Wordle

One puzzle a day, the same word for everyone who visits. Your first game is the one that counts, and solving it updates your streak and every statistic. After that the rounds are unlimited: the play button keeps dealing freshly chosen words for as long as you want them, and none of those touch your stats. That makes them the place to test an opening theory, or to just play without a streak hanging over it.

There's no daily cap and no account gate on any of it. If you'd rather work through words that other people have already played, every past daily is free to replay in the Wordle archive, which is also unlimited and also leaves your streak alone.

Tips for beginners

New to this? Open with a word carrying three different vowels, AUDIO or OUIJA, purely to find out where the vowels live. Follow it with something consonant-heavy to fill in the structure around them.

The bigger thing is not falling in love with a theory. If the feedback rules out your favourite candidate, drop it that second. Green and yellow tiles are facts; everything else you're carrying is a guess. Your feel for common English patterns sharpens on its own with time, and the average guess count comes down with it.