How to play Daily Word

Daily Word is a five-letter deduction puzzle. One hidden word, six guesses, and a colour clue after each one.

Reading the tile colours

After every guess each of the five tiles is coloured.

Green means that letter is in the word and in that exact position. Amber means the letter is in the word but somewhere else. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all.

Every guess must be a real word from the dictionary — you cannot burn a turn on a string of letters — and the dictionary runs to over fifteen thousand five-letter words.

The rule that catches everybody

Repeated letters are where people misread the board.

If the answer contains one E and your guess contains two, only one of your Es will be coloured. The other comes back grey, and that grey does not mean "no E in the word" — it means "no second E". Reading it as the former rules out the right answer and is the single most common way a solve goes wrong.

The same applies to green and amber together: a letter can be green in one position and grey in another in the same guess, which again means there is exactly one of it.

How to open

A good first guess is not the one most likely to be right. It is the one that eliminates the most words regardless of the result.

That means loading it with common letters in common positions. Words built from the letters S, T, A, R, E, N, O, I, L and C do most of the work — openers along the lines of STARE, CRANE, SLATE and ROAST are popular for exactly this reason.

The second guess matters just as much. If your opener came back nearly all grey, do not start guessing candidate answers — play a second word made entirely of five new common letters. Two disjoint openers between them test ten of the twenty-six letters, and that usually leaves only a handful of possible answers.

When to stop probing and start solving

Once you are down to a small number of candidates, the calculation changes.

With four guesses left and three possible answers, guess one of the candidates — you can afford to be wrong twice. With one guess left, obviously guess a candidate.

The awkward case is being down to your last two guesses with four or five candidates that differ by a single letter, the classic being a word where the last four letters are fixed and the first could be several things. If a non-candidate word exists that tests several of those first letters at once, playing it is correct even though it cannot possibly win — it converts a one-in-five guess into a certainty.

How the daily word is chosen

One puzzle a day, the same word for everybody, unlocking at midnight. Solving on consecutive days builds a streak, and your guess distribution is kept so you can see whether you usually land on four or on five.

The share text is a grid of coloured squares showing the shape of your solve without any letters in it, so it spoils nothing.