The rules
There's one puzzle a day, and it's the same word for everyone playing that date's game. Type a five-letter word and press Enter. The game only accepts words on its own list, so random letters get bounced without costing you a turn.
Each tile then changes color. Use what you learned on the next guess. You win if you find the word within six tries. If you don't, the game tells you what it was and you can try again tomorrow.
The official game lives at NYTimes.com. Josh Wardle built it and released it publicly in October 2021, and The New York Times bought it in January 2022.
What the colors mean
Say the answer is SHALE and you play PLANT:
Green is the right letter in the right spot. A is green, so it stays in spot 3.
Yellow is the right letter in the wrong spot. L is yellow, so the word has an L, just not in spot 2.
Gray means the letter isn't in the word, or that you've already used up every copy of it. P, N and T are all gray here, so you can stop trying them.
The official game also has a high-contrast setting that swaps green and yellow for orange and blue. The meaning stays the same.
How repeated letters work
This is where most confusion comes from. The game marks greens first. It then reads your guess left to right and hands out yellows until it runs out of copies of that letter.
Guess GEESE when the answer is THEME:
THEME has two E's, and the last two E's in your guess land on them. That uses both copies, so the first E goes gray even though E is plainly in the word. A gray tile next to a colored copy of the same letter tells you exactly how many copies there are.
Now guess ALLOY when the answer is LOCAL:
Both L's are yellow, which means the answer has at least two L's and neither sits in spot 2 or spot 3. For more examples, see our guide to double letters and gray tiles.
When the puzzle changes
The official game moves on at midnight wherever you are, and each date has its own number. Wordle #0 ran on June 19, 2021, and the number goes up by one each day, which makes today's #1962.
WordHintHub can't follow every time zone at once, so our daily page uses the New York date and says so at the top. If your game shows a different number, look it up in the archive.
Hard Mode
Turn it on in the game's settings before your first guess of the day. Any letter you've uncovered then has to appear in every later guess: greens stay where they are, and yellows have to go somewhere. You lose the option of burning a guess on five fresh letters, which is exactly what makes it harder.
Do answers ever repeat?
They can now. Out of 1,963 puzzles in our records, 29 words have been the answer more than once, and the first repeat came on February 2, 2026. So a word that's already been used is no longer safe to rule out. You can check any word's dates with the word search in the archive.
Where to go from here
If you're new, the starting-words guide will save you the most guesses. If you're stuck partway through a game, today's hints go from gentle to strong, and the solver lists the words that still fit your colors.