Five Letters — Daily Word Game

About Five Letters — Daily Word Game

Today's Five Letters word is the same for every player. You get one go, six guesses, and a new word arrives at 00:00 UTC.

Five Letters is a word-guessing game: find the hidden five-letter word in six tries. After every guess the tiles change colour to show which letters are in the word and which are in the right place, so each guess narrows down the next. The daily word is the same for everyone, and Unlimited lets you keep playing.

Also called: word guessing game, daily word game, five letter word puzzle.

How to play Five Letters

1. Type a five-letter word with your keyboard or the on-screen keys, then press Enter. Every guess has to be a real English word.
2. A green tile means the letter is in the word and in the right spot.
3. A yellow tile means the letter is in the word, but in a different spot.
4. A grey tile means the letter is not in the word (or not in it any more times, see the rules below).
5. The keyboard keeps track of the best colour each letter has earned, so you can see at a glance which letters are left to try.
6. Find the word within six guesses to win. If you run out of guesses, the answer is shown.

Rules

• Every guess must be a five-letter word from the game's word list. Names, abbreviations and made-up words are rejected with "Not in word list", and you keep that row.
• Letters in exactly the right spot are marked green first. Then each other letter is marked yellow only while the answer still has an unused copy of it, working left to right. The rest are grey.
• Duplicate letters: a letter is never coloured more times than it appears in the answer. If the answer is APPLE and you guess PPPPP, only the second and third P turn green; the other three are grey because APPLE has just two Ps.
• Likewise, if the answer has one E and you guess a word with two Es, only one E is coloured: the one in the right spot if there is one, otherwise the first.
• Hard mode (in Settings): every hint you have been given must be used. Green letters must stay where they are, and yellow letters must appear somewhere in your next guess. Hard mode can only be switched before the first guess of a round.
• High contrast (in Settings) swaps green and yellow for orange and blue, which are easier to tell apart with most kinds of colour blindness. Shared results use matching squares.
• The daily word changes at 00:00 UTC. Answers are common English words; plurals and simple past tenses such as CARDS or HOPED are accepted as guesses but are never the answer.

Five Letters tips and strategy

• Open with common letters. The most frequent letters in five-letter English words are roughly E, A, R, T, L, O, S, I and N, in that order. Starting words such as CRANE, SLATE, TRACE, STARE, ROAST or LEARN test several of them at once.
• Use your second guess to explore. If the first word gave you little, try five new letters (for example CRANE then MOIST) rather than juggling the one yellow letter you found.
• Think about where letters usually sit. Many answers end in E, Y, T or R, start with S, C, B or T, and have a vowel or an R in second place. Yellow letters are also information: they tell you where the letter is not.
• Remember doubles. Words like SPEED, LLAMA or GEESE trip people up. If you are stuck with only a few letters found, consider that one of them may appear twice.
• Don't burn guesses on one-letter swaps. If _IGHT could be LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT or TIGHT, a word like MORNS that tests M, R, N and S at once finds the answer faster than guessing each in turn (outside hard mode).
• Play hard mode once you are comfortable. It removes the exploring guesses above and rewards careful reasoning; your streak in hard mode is a real achievement.