Wordle Strategy

The whole strategy in four lines

Guess one tests letters, not the answer. Guess two tests the letters guess one did not. Guess three onward narrows what is left. Only guess when you have stopped learning, or when you are down to two candidates and one of them has to be it.

Almost every avoidable Wordle loss comes from breaking the third line. A player gets four greens, sees the answer might be one of six words, and burns guesses on them one at a time instead of spending one guess on a word that separates them. If you have _OUND and cannot decide between BOUND, FOUND, HOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND and WOUND, guessing them in order is a coin flip repeated. Guessing something like FROMS, which tests four of the eight opening letters at once, turns eight candidates into one or two.

The Wordle word finder orders results by exactly this, so the word at the top is the one that splits what is left most evenly rather than the one most likely to be right.

Wordle hard mode: what it changes

Hard mode is a setting, not a different puzzle. Turn it on and every letter the board has revealed must appear in every guess you make afterwards: greens stay in their positions, yellows have to be somewhere in the word. The answers are the same answers.

What it takes away is the separating guess described above. In normal play, holding _OUND with eight candidates, you can spend a guess on a word that shares nothing with them and learn which opening letter is live. Hard mode forbids it, because that word would not contain the O, U, N and D you have already found. You have to guess into the crowd, one word at a time, and hope.

So hard mode is not uniformly harder, it is harder in a specific place: it costs you nothing on a word with few neighbours and can cost you the game on a word with many. That makes the next section the map of where hard mode will hurt.

One thing it does not change is your opener, since an empty board constrains nothing. LARES is as good a first guess in hard mode as out of it, and the three-word opening on the starting words page is the one thing hard mode genuinely rules out: CAMPS shares no letters with OUTER, which is the entire point of it and exactly what hard mode forbids.

The hardest Wordle words, and why

Not the obscure ones. An obscure word full of rare letters is easy the moment you find one of them, because almost nothing else has a Z in it. The words that eat four guesses are ordinary words that keep company: you have four letters right by guess two and then no way to tell the survivors apart.

So difficulty here is counted, not asserted. Two words are neighbours when they differ in exactly one position. Across the 8,654 five-letter words in our dictionary the average word has 5.77 neighbours, and 745 have none at all, which makes them the easy ones: get four letters and the fifth is forced.

The worst traps

Each row is one open position with every word that fits it. Land in one of these with a guess to spare and you are not solving a puzzle any more, you are drawing lots.

The worst of them is _ILLS, with 17 words fitting a single open slot. Getting the other four letters tells you nothing about which one it is, and in hard mode you cannot ask.

The words with the most company

Counting every neighbour across all five positions rather than the worst single cluster. CARES leads with 37 words one letter away.

• CARES37 neighbours
• CORES31 neighbours
• PALES31 neighbours
• PARES31 neighbours
• FARES30 neighbours
• HARES29 neighbours
• MATES29 neighbours
• TALES29 neighbours
• MARES28 neighbours
• MINES28 neighbours
• RATES28 neighbours
• SINES28 neighbours

One caveat worth stating plainly. This is computed over the whole public-domain dictionary, not over the curated list the New York Times actually draws answers from, which it has never published and we do not have. Some words above will never be an answer. The traps are real regardless: a crowd of neighbours is a crowd whether or not every member of it is answer material, and it is the crowd that costs you the guess.

What to do when you are stuck on guess five

Count the candidates first. With two, guess one; there is nothing to learn that is worth a turn. With three or more and two guesses left, spend one on separating them even if the word you play cannot possibly be right. With three or more and one guess left, you are picking, and the honest thing is to pick the most ordinary word in the list, because the answer lists lean common.

If you would rather not count by hand, put the board into the word finder, or take a labelled clue from today's hints, which start vague and stop well short of the answer unless you ask for it.