Question 1

How do you play Hard Mode?

Accepted Answer

Guess the hidden 5-letter word in 6 tries. After each guess every letter is marked: green means right letter in the right place, amber means the letter is in the word but somewhere else, and grey means it is not in the word at all.

Question 2

Is this free? Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

Free, no account, nothing installed. Your statistics stay in this browser rather than on a server.

Question 3

Is there only one puzzle a day?

Accepted Answer

No — play as many as you like. The one-a-day limit is a scarcity mechanic rather than a feature of the game, and it is the single most common reason people go looking for another Wordle.

Question 4

Where do the answers come from?

Accepted Answer

A hand-curated list of 819 common 5-letter words. That curation is the biggest quality difference between a good Wordle and a bad one: a system dictionary has thousands of 5-letter words and cheerfully offers things like "fubsy" and "yamen". Losing on a word you have never seen is not a hard puzzle, it is a bad one.

Question 5

Why was my real word rejected?

Accepted Answer

It should not have been — the guess list is far larger than the answer list, and deliberately so. Anything reasonable is accepted as a guess even though it will never be the answer, because refusing a real word mid-guess is worse than accepting an odd one. If a genuine word is turned down, the bug report link at the bottom of the page goes straight to us.

Question 6

What happens when a letter appears twice?

Accepted Answer

Each letter in the answer can only be "claimed" once. If the answer is ABBEY and you guess BOOKS, only one B is marked, because the answer has two Bs but your guess only used one. If the answer is CIVIC and you guess MIMIC, the second I is grey — the only I in the answer was already claimed by the green. This is where most Wordle clones get it wrong, and it is subtle enough that the bug survives a lot of play before anybody notices.

Question 7

What is hard mode?

Accepted Answer

Every hint you have uncovered must be used in every later guess: a green letter has to stay in its place and an amber letter has to appear somewhere. It changes the game rather than decorating it — without it, the strongest play is to spend your second guess on 5 entirely fresh letters, which is efficient and unsatisfying. This game has it on permanently.

Question 8

What is the best word to start with?

Accepted Answer

Any word that spends its letters well — common consonants and two or three different vowels. The point of the opening guess is information, not a lucky hit, so a word with five distinct common letters is worth more than one with a repeat. There is no single right answer, and using the same opener every day is a perfectly good strategy.

Question 9

Should I guess a word I know is wrong?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, and this is the real skill. If four candidates remain and they differ in letters your next guess could test all at once, spending a turn on a word that cannot be the answer will often beat guessing one of the four. In hard mode you are not allowed to, which is exactly what makes hard mode hard.

Question 10

What do the colours mean if I cannot tell green from amber?

Accepted Answer

The tiles carry a shape as well as a colour: a green tile has a bright inner ring, an amber tile has a light corner notch, and a grey tile has neither. Roughly one man in twelve cannot reliably separate red-green hues, and colour alone is the entire feedback in this game.

Question 11

Can I undo a guess?

Accepted Answer

No, and that is the game rather than an omission — a guess you can take back is not a guess. You can delete letters before you submit, and nothing is submitted until you press Enter.

Question 12

Can I use my own keyboard?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Type letters, Enter to submit, Backspace to delete. The on-screen keyboard is drawn rather than being a text field on purpose: a real input on a phone raises the system keyboard over the board and offers autocorrect on a five-letter puzzle.

Question 13

Can I share my result?

Accepted Answer

Yes — the Copy result button gives you the grid of coloured squares. It shows how you did without giving away a single letter, which is why the original spread the way it did.

Question 14

Can I replay the same word?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every puzzle has a number and the same number always produces the same word. Share the link and the other person gets your exact puzzle — useful for racing a friend on equal terms.

Question 15

What is Dordle?

Accepted Answer

Two hidden words solved at the same time from the same guesses, with eight tries for both. It is not twice the difficulty so much as a different one: a guess that narrows the left board can be wasted on the right, and you have to decide which board to serve.

Question 16

What is Quordle?

Accepted Answer

Four hidden words at once, ten guesses. At four boards your opening guess stops being a habit and starts being a decision, because you are trying to learn something about four different words with one word.

Question 17

Does the word length change how hard it is?

Accepted Answer

Less than people expect, and not always in the direction you would guess. Four-letter words give you less information per row but there are far fewer of them; six-letter words tell you more per guess but leave more to eliminate. Four letters is quicker rather than easier.

Question 18

Are proper nouns or plurals ever the answer?

Accepted Answer

No proper nouns, and plurals ending in -s are kept out too. A word ending in -s makes the last letter close to a free guess, which flattens the puzzle. Words like "chess" and "grass" are fine — the rule is about plurals, not about the letter.

Question 19

Is there a daily streak?

Accepted Answer

No streaks and no daily lock. Nothing here punishes you for missing a day, because the counter that makes you feel bad about a Tuesday is a retention mechanic and not a game.

Question 20

Does it work offline or on a phone?

Accepted Answer

It runs entirely in your browser with no round trip per guess, so a flaky connection does not interrupt a game once the page has loaded. On a phone the keyboard is drawn to fit: the keys are taller than they are wide, because ten across a 390px screen leaves about 32px each and vertical space is what a phone has.

Question 21

What other word games are here?

Accepted Answer

This site runs one engine across all of them: Wordle, Hard Mode, 4-Letter Wordle, 6-Letter Wordle, Dordle, Quordle. Word length, guess count, hard mode and how many boards you solve at once are four numbers, and every game in the family is a point in that space.