How Daily Word works
The rules are short. Guess a five-letter word. Each letter comes back green if it is in the answer and in the right position, yellow if it is in the answer but somewhere else, and grey if it is not in the answer at all. You get six guesses. Everyone playing on the same day gets the same word, and a new one appears at midnight in your local time.
What makes the puzzle interesting is that it rewards information, not luck. A guess that eliminates many possibilities is worth more than a guess that might happen to be correct, especially early on. Strong players deliberately spend their second guess on letters they suspect are absent, because ruling letters out narrows the field faster than confirming one does.
Guess distribution and letter frequency
| Guesses used | Roughly how often | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 2% | Lucky opener |
| 3 | 20% | Very strong |
| 4 | 36% | The most common result |
| 5 | 26% | Comfortable |
| 6 | 12% | Close call |
| Failed | 4% | Usually a word with repeated letters |
| Position | Most common letters |
|---|---|
| First | S, C, B, T, P |
| Second | A, O, R, E, I |
| Third | A, I, O, E, U |
| Fourth | E, N, S, A, L |
| Fifth | S, E, Y, D, T |
| Overall | E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N |
How to solve in fewer guesses
- Open with a word carrying five distinct common letters. Words built from the high-frequency set cover the most ground on a single guess. Repeating a letter in your opener wastes one of only five slots you get for free.
- Spend guess two on entirely new letters. Even if guess one produced two greens, a second word made of fresh letters usually narrows the field further than trying to solve immediately. You have six guesses; using two for information still leaves four.
- Watch for repeated letters late. Most failed puzzles involve a word with a doubled letter. If you have four confirmed letters and nothing fits, try doubling one of them before assuming you have a wrong letter.
- Use yellows as position information, not just presence. A yellow tells you two things: the letter is in the word, and it is not in that specific slot. The second half is the part people forget, and it eliminates a surprising number of candidates.
- Do not guess a word you know is impossible. Throwing away a guess on a word contradicting known greens is common under time pressure and is almost always a mistake. Every guess should be consistent with everything you already know, or deliberately chosen to test new letters.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a new word every day?
Yes. The daily puzzle changes at midnight in your local time zone, and everyone who plays on a given day gets the same word. If you want more, practice mode gives you unlimited random puzzles that do not affect the daily.
What is the best starting word?
Words made of five distinct high-frequency letters perform best. Openers built around some combination of A, E, R, O, T, L, S and N consistently outperform words with rarer letters or repeated ones. There is no single perfect answer, and the difference between the good options is small.
How many guesses is a good result?
Four is the most common result. Three is very good. Two is mostly luck, since after one guess you rarely have enough information to determine the word with certainty.
What words can I guess?
Any five-letter word in the dictionary list is accepted as a guess, which is roughly eight thousand words. The answers are drawn from a much smaller list of about a thousand common words, so obscure vocabulary is never the answer even though you can guess it.
Is this the same as Wordle?
It uses the same well-known guess-and-feedback format, which predates Wordle in various forms including the pen-and-paper game Jotto and the TV show Lingo. This is an independent implementation with its own word list, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by The New York Times.
Can I play past puzzles?
Not directly, but practice mode draws randomly from the same answer list and is unlimited, so it covers the same vocabulary without the once-a-day limit.