Word Guess Game

How to play

A secret five-letter English word is hidden, and you have six tries to find it. Type five letters, press Submit or Enter, and every tile takes a color that tells you how that letter relates to the secret word. You then use those colors to choose a better guess. The round ends the moment you type the exact word, and if you use all six tries the answer is revealed. You do not need to be a spelling expert: even without knowing the word, the colors let you eliminate possibilities step by step.

• Green: the letter is right and sits in the right position.
• Yellow: the letter is in the word, but in a different position.
• Gray: the word has no more copies of that letter (see the repeated-letter rules below).
• Only the letters A to Z are kept in the input box; digits, symbols and other scripts are removed automatically, and capitalization does not matter.
• The row of letters above the input box shows the best result you have seen for each letter (green beats yellow beats gray).
• After a round ends, "Copy result" copies your tries as colored squares without revealing the answer or your letters.

How the colors are decided when letters repeat

Scoring happens in two passes. First, every position where your letter exactly matches the secret word is marked green, and the secret word's remaining letters, the ones not used up by a green match, are placed into a small pool. Second, the game walks through your non-green tiles from left to right: if that letter is still in the pool, the tile turns yellow and one copy leaves the pool; if the pool has none left, the tile is gray. So if the secret word contains a letter once but your guess uses it twice, only one of the two tiles is colored and the other turns gray. The key consequence is that a gray tile does not always mean "this letter is not in the word". It can also mean "you have already found all the copies".

About this game's word list

Each round the answer is picked at random from a built-in list of 46 five-letter words when you press "New Game". It is not a daily puzzle, and the same word can appear twice in a row. The input is not restricted to that list: any combination of five letters is accepted as a guess and uses one try, even if it is not a dictionary word. That means you may deliberately play an unusual word to test letters, but the answer is always one of the 46 words. Of those 46 words, 7 use the same letter more than once, and the whole list uses 25 different letters of the alphabet. The list is small compared with the full English vocabulary, so what you learn here about letter frequencies applies to this game rather than to English in general.

Letter frequencies in this list

The table counts how many of the 46 words contain each letter at least once. These are properties of this particular list, computed when the page was built, not general English statistics. Because the answer is known to come from the list, the distribution is a real clue about which letters to test first.

Choosing a first guess by information

A single guess can produce 3 to the 5th power, or 243, different color patterns, which is at most about 7.92bits of information. Picking one answer out of 46 candidates needs only about 5.52 bits. In theory, one or two well-chosen guesses can shrink the field enormously. The table below tests that idea. For each possible first guess taken from the list, the page scored it against all 46 possible answers and counted how many different color patterns appear. More patterns, and a smaller worst-case group of remaining candidates, mean a better opening move.

Starting with VOICE splits the 46 candidates into 29 different patterns, and even in the unluckiest case only 4 words remain. JUMPY, which uses rare letters, produces just 15 patterns and can leave 24 candidates. This is why openers made of five different, common letters work well: they test many likely letters at once, and the common vowels in particular carry the most information.

Worked examples

Example 1: reading a repeated letter. Suppose you guess SPEED and only the first E is yellow, while the second E is gray. The secret word contains exactly one E, and it is neither in the third nor the fourth position. Treating the gray E as "no E in the word" and discarding the letter would send you down the wrong path.

Example 2: locking greens. You guess LLAMA and both A tiles are green. The third and fifth positions are now fixed as A, and you only have to solve three other positions. If the first L is yellow while the second L is gray, the word contains exactly one L and it is not first; with positions three and five taken by A, the L must be in the second or fourth position.

Example 3: a second guess that earns its place. If your first guess shows no greens and only a couple of yellows, move the yellow letters to new positions and bring in two or three fresh letters at the same time. If instead you see three greens, spend your time listing the words that fit the pattern rather than testing new letters.

Practical strategy

• Treat the first two guesses as questions, not as attempts to win. Two words with ten different letters between them test ten letters in one go.
• Check the letter row above the input box so you do not reuse letters that are already gray, except letters that may have turned gray only because of repetition.
• The sixth try should be a confirmation, not a gamble. Narrow the candidates down by the fifth try so the last guess is a choice among a few words.
• Because the word list is short, repeated play will show familiar words. Memorizing them is the strongest strategy, but it also takes the fun out of the puzzle.

Common misunderstandings and limits

• "Made-up words will be rejected." They will not. There is no spelling check, so any five letters use up a try. A typo costs a guess.
• The word list is not a sample of real English usage, so the frequency numbers on this page describe this game only.
• Nothing is saved: no scores, streaks or statistics are stored in your browser, so there is nothing to clear and a reload starts a fresh round with a new word.
• The game only supports the 26 letters A to Z. If your keyboard is set to another language, the characters are removed; switch to an English layout first.
• The answer is chosen with Math.random(), a general-purpose generator suitable for a game but not for security or lotteries.

Frequently Asked Questions

Try another word game

If you prefer rearranging letters, try the Word Scramble Game. To guess a word one letter at a time, play Hangman. For quick strategy practice, Tic-Tac-Toe is a small, rule-based game, and the Memory Match Game trains short-term recall.