How to Solve Wordle in Fewer Guesses

Pick a strong first word, read the colors correctly, and turn your clues into a short list of answers. Includes a full worked game.

Wordle gives you six guesses to find a hidden five letter word. After each guess, every letter turns green, yellow or gray. Solving it in fewer guesses comes down to three habits: starting with common letters, reading the colors exactly, and not guessing blindly when several answers are still possible.

This guide covers each one, then walks through a full game using the word finder on this site.

What the colors mean

  • Green: the letter is in the word, in that exact position.
  • Yellow: the letter is in the word, but not in that position. Both parts are clues: a yellow A in the third box also rules out every word with A third.
  • Gray: the letter is not in the word, with one exception below.

The exception is repeated letters. If you guess a word with two of the same letter and the answer has only one, Wordle colors one of them and leaves the other gray. A gray T next to a yellow T means the answer has exactly one T, not zero. If both copies turn green or yellow, the answer has at least two.

Pick a first word with common letters

Your first guess has no clues to go on, so it should test the most common letters. We counted all 9,349 five letter words in this site's word list. The letters that appear in the most words are S, E, A, R, O, I, L and T.

S comes out on top because 2,907 of those words end in S, mostly plurals and verb forms like BOOKS and TAKES. Wordle answers are almost never plurals, so S is less useful than the raw count suggests. With the words ending in S removed, the order becomes E, A, R, O, I, L, T and N.

That is why words like SLATE, CRANE, TRACE, IRATE and STARE are popular openers: each one tests several of the most common letters, including two or three vowels. Vowel heavy openers like ADIEU and AUDIO find vowels quickly, but they tell you little about consonants, which are usually harder to pin down.

Position matters too. In our count, A is the most common second letter, E is by far the most common fourth letter, and among words that do not end in S, Y and E are the most common last letters. An opener with common letters in common spots gets more greens.

Turn your clues into a search

The word finder has three boxes, and each Wordle color goes in one of them:

  • Green letters go in Letters By Position, in their box.
  • Yellow letters go in Make Words With These Letters. When you enter fewer letters than the word length, the finder returns words that contain all of them plus any other letters.
  • Gray letters go in Letters To Exclude. You can type every gray letter without worrying about repeats: if a letter is also in one of the other boxes, the finder ignores it in the exclude box.

The finder cannot rule out the spot where a letter was yellow. After you search, skip any word that puts a yellow letter back in that spot.

A worked game

Guess 1: SLATE

S gray, L gray, A yellow, T yellow, E gray

S, L and E are gray. A and T are yellow, so both are in the word, but A is not third and T is not fourth. Entering A and T as letters and S, L and E as excluded letters gives 243 possible words. That is too many to guess from, so the next guess should test new letters.

Guess 2: TORCH

T yellow, O gray, R gray, C green, H green

TORCH tests four new letters and moves T to a new position. C and H are green in the last two boxes, T is yellow again (so it is not first either), and O and R are gray. Adding C and H to the position boxes and O and R to the exclude box leaves nine words:

  • aitch 10
  • batch 12
  • catch 12
  • gatch 11
  • hatch 13
  • match 12
  • natch 10
  • patch 12
  • watch 13

None of them put A third or T first or fourth, so all nine are still possible.

Avoid the guessing trap

Eight of the nine words end in ATCH. With nine candidates and four guesses left, guessing them one at a time can easily use up all your guesses. Instead, spend one guess on a word that tests as many of the possible first letters as it can, even if it cannot be the answer.

The finder can help pick that word. The first letters still in play include B, G, M, N, P and W. Searching for five letter words that contain M, P and W returns five words: SWAMP, WHOMP, WHUMP, WIMPS and WIMPY. WHOMP tests W, M and P in one guess.

Guess 3: WHOMP

W green, H yellow, O gray, M gray, P gray

W is green in the first box, and only one of the nine candidates starts with W. If M or P had turned yellow instead, that would have pointed straight at MATCH or PATCH. If all three had been gray, the list would still have dropped from nine to six with three guesses left.

Guess 4: WATCH

W green, A green, T green, C green, H green

Solved in four.

A note on Hard Mode

In Hard Mode, every green letter has to stay in place and every yellow letter has to appear in later guesses. The game above would not work in Hard Mode: after SLATE, every guess has to include A and T, so TORCH is not allowed, and neither is WHOMP. Since every guess has to keep the letters you have found, the ATCH trap is much harder to escape, so use your first two guesses to test as many different consonants as you can.

Quick checklist

  1. Open with a word that tests common letters, such as SLATE, CRANE or TRACE.
  2. Treat yellow as two clues: the letter is in the word, and not in that spot.
  3. Watch for repeated letters before assuming a gray letter is missing.
  4. When many answers still fit, use your second guess to test new letters.
  5. When three or more answers differ by one letter and you have guesses to spare, spend one on a word that tests several of those letters at once.

You can run any of these searches yourself with the 5 letter word finder.

More guides

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