How to play
A word is hidden. Type any real word of the same length and press Enter, and every letter is graded: green means the letter is correct and in the right place, amber means the letter is in the word but somewhere else, and grey means it is not in the word at all. Use what each guess rules out to narrow things down. You get one more guess than the word has letters — six tries at a five-letter word.
There is no daily limit here. Every round draws a fresh word at random, so you can play as long as you like, and the game remembers where you were if you close the tab.
Controls
- Type letters — on your keyboard or the one on screen
- Enter — submit the guess
- Backspace — delete a letter
- Hard — every clue you have uncovered must be reused in later guesses. Switches on at the start of a new word
- Colours — swaps green and amber for blue and orange, which stay distinct with red-green colour blindness
Word lengths
| Length | Guesses | Possible answers |
|---|---|---|
| 4 letters | 5 | 1,443 |
| 5 letters | 6 | 1,959 |
| 6 letters | 7 | 2,544 |
Longer is not simply harder. A six-letter word gives you more letters of feedback per guess and there are fewer words that fit a given pattern, but you have to pull a longer word out of memory. Four letters is the tightest squeeze: little feedback per guess, and plenty of words left over at the end.
Tips
- Spend the first guess on vowels and common consonants. Something like AROSE or CRANE tests five high-frequency letters at once. Which word you start with matters far less than covering ground.
- Do not chase a single green letter. Early on, ruling letters out is worth more than locking one in. A guess made entirely of new letters often tells you more than a near miss.
- Watch for repeated letters. They are what catches people out at the end — if four positions are settled and nothing fits, a doubled letter is usually the answer.
- Mind the endings. Answers here are never plurals or simple past tenses, so a trailing S or ED is not the easy out it looks like.
About this game
Guessing a hidden word from letter-by-letter clues is an old idea: the pen-and-paper game Jotto dates to 1955, and Mastermind brought the same deduction to coloured pegs in 1970. This is an independent take on the format with a few things the classic version does not have — a choice of word length, unlimited rounds instead of one a day, and a colour-blind palette.
The word lists come from the English Speller Database (formerly SCOWL), assembled by Kevin Atkinson and drawing on 12dicts and ENABLE2K. Answers are limited to words an ordinary speaker would recognise, while the list of guesses the game will accept is much wider — so a real word is never rejected just because it would make an unfair answer.