A good opening word is not the one most likely to be the answer - it is the one that eliminates the most words when it is wrong. Open with a word carrying five distinct common letters and at least two vowels, then use your second guess to test a completely different set of letters rather than shuffling the first result around. Most puzzles fall in three or four guesses that way, and in a scored game that is where all the points are.
Key takeaways
- Your first two guesses should share no letters. Coverage beats cleverness.
- A yellow letter is more informative than a green one, because it rules out a position as well as confirming a letter.
- Solving in fewer guesses is worth 100 points each, so guess two is worth 400 more than guess six.
- A hint costs 150 points - more than a whole extra guess - so it is rarely a good trade.
- Longer words score more: a seven-letter round is worth 1.8x a three-letter one.
What makes a good opening word
The purpose of guess one is elimination, not luck. You want to learn the maximum about the answer, which means testing the letters most likely to appear and never wasting a slot on a repeat.
That gives three criteria: five distinct letters, at least two vowels, and a bias towards the consonants that appear most often in English words - r, s, t, l and n. Words like AROSE, RAISE, SLATE and CRANE all fit, and the difference between them is small enough not to matter.
What does matter is what you do with the result. If guess one comes back with one yellow letter, the instinct is to build guess two around it. Resist that. A second word made mostly of letters you have already tested tells you almost nothing new.
The two-word opening
The strongest reliable technique is to decide both of your first two words in advance, chosen so they share no letters at all. Between them they test ten distinct letters, which for a five-letter puzzle usually narrows the field to a handful of candidates before you have spent half your guesses.
AROSE followed by LINTY, or SLATE followed by CHIRP, both work. The exact pair matters far less than the discipline of not repeating a letter across the two.
The cost is that you sometimes ignore a green letter for one turn. That feels wasteful and generally is not: knowing that eight more letters are absent is usually worth more than confirming the position of one letter you already know is present.
Yellow letters carry more information than green
A green letter tells you one thing: this letter is here. A yellow letter tells you two: this letter is in the word, and it is not in this position. In a five-letter word that second fact removes a fifth of the possibilities for that letter immediately.
So when you are choosing where to place a known-yellow letter in your next guess, do not simply move it one square along. Move it to the position you consider most likely, and if you have two yellow letters, swap both at once rather than testing them one at a time.
The trap is repeated letters. If a letter comes back yellow once, that does not mean it appears only once, and a word with a doubled letter will defeat a solver who assumes otherwise. When you are down to a few candidates and none of them fit, a double letter is usually the reason.
The scoring, and why hints are a bad deal
Our word game scores from a base of 1000. Each guess you did not need is worth 100, so solving in two rather than six is worth 400 extra before any multipliers. Each hint you take subtracts 150.
Put those side by side and the conclusion is blunt: a hint costs half as much again as an entire extra guess. Taking a hint to save one guess is a net loss of 50 points, every time. The only situation where a hint pays is when it turns a failed round into a solved one.
Two multipliers sit on top. The word length sets one - the game climbs from three letters to seven, and the multiplier runs from 1.0 at three letters to 1.8 at seven, so a longer word is worth substantially more for the same performance. A daily streak sets the other, running from 1.0 up to 2.0. Both multiply the same base, so the highest-scoring round is a long word solved in one or two guesses on a long streak.
- Base score: 1000, with a floor of 100 after penalties.
- Attempt bonus: 100 for every guess you did not use.
- Hint penalty: 150 each.
- Length multiplier: 1.0 at three letters, rising by 0.2 per letter to 1.8 at seven.
- Streak multiplier: 1.0 to 2.0, from consecutive daily play.
How word length changes the puzzle
Shorter is not easier. The three-letter pool holds 388 words and the four-letter pool holds 603, so a four-letter puzzle has more candidates than a three-letter one - but you still get six guesses either way, and each guess covers a larger fraction of a short word.
The real difficulty curve is about constraint. A three-letter word gives you very little to work with per guess: one wrong letter eliminates far fewer candidates than it would in a seven-letter word, where a single confirmed letter plus its position often collapses the field to a few options.
Practically, treat long words as more tractable, not less. Seven letters means more surface area for your opening pair to hit, and the 1.8x multiplier means the rounds that feel hardest are also the ones worth playing carefully.
Practising without spoiling the daily
The daily word is the same for everyone on a given day in their own timezone, and it is chosen by a salted shuffle rather than by counting forward through an alphabetical list.
That last detail exists because of a real bug. The running order used to increment by one per day through a sorted list, so consecutive days produced consecutive entries - one week of five-letter words ran CHAIN, CHAIR, CHART, CHASE, CHEAP, CHECK, CHEST. Anyone playing two days in a row could guess the next day opening letters without trying to cheat.
Practice mode draws at random from the same pool but is guaranteed never to hand you the current day word, so you can warm up on the same difficulty without spoiling the puzzle you have not played yet.
Try it
Everything above was measured against this game. It is free, runs in the browser, and needs no account.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best starting word for a word guessing game?
Any word with five distinct common letters and at least two vowels. AROSE, RAISE, SLATE and CRANE are all near-equivalent. The choice matters far less than the follow-up: your second guess should share no letters with the first, so that between them you have tested ten different letters.
Should I use a hint?
Usually not. A hint costs 150 points while an unused guess is worth 100, so taking a hint to save a single guess loses 50 points outright. Hints only pay when they turn a round you were going to fail into one you solve, because a failed round forfeits the attempt bonus entirely.
Is a yellow letter better than a green one?
It carries more information. Green tells you a letter is in that position; yellow tells you the letter is in the word and is not in that position, which eliminates possibilities as well as confirming one. When you reposition a yellow letter, move it to your best guess rather than simply shifting it one square.
Are shorter words easier to guess?
Not especially. The three-letter pool holds 388 words and the four-letter pool 603, and you get six guesses regardless. Longer words are often more tractable because each confirmed letter constrains the answer more sharply, and they score up to 1.8 times as much.
Can I practise without spoiling the daily puzzle?
Yes. Practice mode draws randomly from the same word list but deliberately excludes the current day answer, so you can play as many rounds as you like at the same difficulty without seeing the daily word before you have attempted it.