Five Letters: The Daily Word Game, Plus Unlimited Practice 🔤

The rules

Guess a five-letter word. Each tile comes back green (right letter, right position), yellow (right letter, wrong position) or grey (not in the word). Six guesses.

Choosing an opening word

A good opener maximises information, not the chance of a lucky hit. That means common letters and, ideally, a shape that splits the possible answers evenly.

Words like CRANE, SLATE, TRACE and ADIEU are popular for good reason: they load up on E, A, R, T, S, N and the vowels. The exact choice matters much less than people argue about — anything with three common consonants and two vowels is within a fraction of optimal.

What genuinely hurts is opening with a word containing a repeated letter. FLUFF spends three of its five slots learning about one letter.

The guess-two mistake

Here's the one that costs games. You open with SLATE and get a yellow A. Instinct says: play another word with A somewhere else, to pin it down.

That's usually wrong. You already know the answer contains an A and that it isn't in position three — you'll find its position eventually. What you don't know is anything about the other twenty-one letters. The stronger play is a second word made almost entirely of fresh common letters — think ROUND after SLATE — so that by guess three you're choosing between two or three candidates instead of twelve.

Chase certainty at guess four and five. Chase information at guess two.

About our version

A fresh word every day, the same one for everybody, resetting at midnight in your own timezone. And an unlimited practice mode — because being locked out for 24 hours after a 90-second game is a decision that serves engagement metrics rather than players.

2,500 answers in the pool, an on-screen keyboard that tracks which letters you've eliminated, and a streak counter.

It runs in your browser, works offline once loaded, needs no account, and costs nothing.

Questions people actually ask

What's the best starting word?
Anything with three common consonants and two vowels — CRANE, SLATE and TRACE are all excellent. The difference between the top few dozen openers is small enough not to worry about.

Can I play more than once a day?
Yes. There's a daily word and an unlimited practice mode, so you can keep playing as long as you like.

When does the daily word reset?
At midnight in your device's timezone.

Keep reading

• Wend: Four Hidden Words, Every Letter Used 🔤 — Four words snake through a grid of letters, and every single tile belongs to one of them. Find three and the fourth is forced.
• Word Games in Go Brain: Four Ways to Play With Letters 🧠 — A daily five-letter word, a grid of hidden word paths, four photos with one answer, and riddles designed to fool you. Four very different ways to play with language.
• 4 Pics 1 Word: Four Photos, One Answer 🖼️ — Four photos, one word linking them. The trick is that the link is almost never the obvious category — it's usually a second meaning.