How to Solve Wordle Puzzles (Tips & Strategies)

Wordle is an online browser game with a simple enough premise: players have six tries to guess a five-letter word. They type in a word, and the game tells them if they have correct letters in the correct spots, correct letters in the wrong spots, or if the letters don’t appear in the word at all. These are represented by the colors green, yellow, and grey, though there is a high contrast color mode as well.

Wordle has recently taken the world by storm, as it doesn’t require any special hardware or software to play. Players just open a browser on their device of choice, and the game is free to play on the Wordle website. Wordle has one puzzle per day, meaning that there isn’t a significant time investment either.

The only thing Wordle really requires is for players to understand how words in English work. Since players only have six guesses to figure out the word, they need to approach it with some strategy. Luckily, English words tend to be constructed in specific ways, and while there are some truly bizarre words out there, there are probably some words that won’t appear in-game.

Guessing Words in Wordle

To solve their daily Wordle puzzle, players should start with vowels. The letters A, E, I, O, and U, are found in nearly every English word, with Y acting as a vowel when no other vowels appear in a word. In fact, Y more frequently acts as a vowel, unless it is at the beginning of a word. For example, Y is a consonant in “yards” but a vowel in “myths.” The most common vowel in English is E, so players should try to make a word that has an E somewhere in it. They might not get it in the correct place, but it at least helps them narrow down selections. Unlike in Wheel of Fortune, there’s no need to buy vowels, so players should use them liberally to determine which are part of the word.

Just because a letter is in the correct place does not mean that it is the only instance of that letter in the word. For example, say the word is “small,” and the player guesses “snail.” The S, A, and L are in the correct places, but players still need to uncover the other L. This can be easy to forget if players aren’t vigilant.

Sometimes, it’s okay to enter a word players know is incorrect if it gets them closer to the correct answer. This means using letters that have already been eliminated. This shouldn’t be used as a common strategy given the limited number of guesses, but it can help players find more letters used in each correct Wordle word. The game has a helpful keyboard at the bottom, which also shows which letters are in the correct place and which are not.

These are some simple strategies that players can employ. There’s no special award for figuring out the Wordle word in fewer than six guesses, but it can be a bragging right among friends. In fact, it has become popular to share results on Twitter.

Wordle is available on all platforms with browser capabilities.

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