Wordle puzzles: solutions, tips and tricks on how to win

(Image credit: Wordle)

last updated 25 March 2022

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Finding a random five-letter word with six attempts is quite easy. All you need is to have a system and be a little bit good with words. But some days, Wordle is a struggle. Maybe there are other things in the world that are distracting you. That's why, when inspiration or aptitude fails you, we're here to bring you the answer. Some people may call it cheating if they like; we're not going to judge anyone.

Before you're really ready to give in and discover today's solution, there's a clue just below here, so you can still have the satisfaction of completing the puzzle on your own.

You can play today's game at Wordle's home at the New York Times. They paid 'a seven-figure sum' to bring the game to their site and are probably reaping the rewards, as people need cheering up after reading the news these days, let's face it. And before reading it, come to that.

What is Wordle?

Wordle is an internet sensation that’s exploded in 2022. It's a simple word game created by a Brooklyn-based software engineer by the name of Josh Wardle – yes, that's where the name comes from; the working title was Joshle. Ward created the game as a side project due to his love of word games and it seems millions of others love it too.

The objective of Wordle is to guess the five-letter word of the day and you have six tries in which to get it right. With each attempt, you are told if any of the letters you used are in the final word, with green boxes (right letter, right place) and grey ones (right letter, wrong place). If you’re colour blind, you’ll be glad to know there is a different colour scheme available.

Through these clues, you can eliminate letters and determine the answer.

Whether you nail the word or not, Wordle gives you statistics on your guess distribution and winning streak. You can also share your triumph – or abject failure –with friends or on social. All your friends and followers see is a grid of those green and gray boxes; not the letters, so as not to spoil it.

There's only one word per day and everyone has the same one – but not at the same time. A new Wordle appears at midnight wherever you are, as if by magic. That means players in Australia get to see it before everyone else, and can therefore ruin it for everyone else in the world, by posting the solution on Twitter etc. Bloody Australians! [Shakes fist southwards].

Has Wordle got harder?

When the New York Times took over publishing Wordle, there was a certain amount of controversy among certain users, who were convinced the upscale news site had made the game harder. The perception seemed to be that them east coast snobs was using their $10 words and fancy-pants ways to make the game impossible for folks who hadn‘t done no book learnin’ nor been to Yale.

This was partly due to the appearance of the word CAULK – ironically, a word known by all plumbers and decorators, amateur and professional alike. So perhaps not that hard.

Furthermore, close inspection of the code of Wordle reveals that the words are not chosen by the New York Times, or by humans. No, the list is hard coded into the app, with words chosen in a set, pseudo-random order by the Wordle machine itself. Some are easy and some are hard, just as life itself is sometimes easy, like Sunday morning, and sometimes hard, like Monday morning.

The New York Times has, however, removed a few words from the preset list that it thought might upset people. Words like POOPY and SHART, we expect.

Of course, the NYT could one day choose to only use words such as SQUAB, OUIJA, PLOOV and COVFEFE, and deliberately ruin your day. But for now, it’s not, so quit your whining.

Incidentally, if you actively want to play a version of Wordle that really is harder, try the clone Hellowordl. This lets you chase words of up to 11 letters in length – or as few as four – and we can confirm that can be quite hard. Just coming up with a string of 11-letter guesses is difficult enough, never mind getting the correct one.

How to win at Wordle

You can play Wordle the way most people do, or you can operate a system. Most folks, we are pretty sure, choose a word they like and then work from there. We’ve found that the most effective way, however, is to start with TWO words that use as many of the most used letters in the English language as possible. We largely ignore the correct letters in the first word until guess number three.

Generally we use ALIEN and SHOUT; that covers all the vowels plus S and T. That’s not based on any deep analysis, so this cunning scheme could probably be optimised further by using two even better words.

We have to tell you, though: we have never lost at Wordle. Here‘s our stats as of February 26.

Fascinating Wordle fact of the day: if you don’t play every day, you’ll lose your running streak even if you have a 100% success rate. Boy were we annoyed when we found that out.

Wordle archive

If you want to play Wordle games from previous days you can now do that on the Wordle Archive. This has every game back to #1 for you to complete. If you're looking for the previous day's solutions, here are the last 20 for you. Seriously though, if you’re cheating on the answers to Wordles that aren’t even the current one, that is verging on sad.

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years.

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."

With contributions from

Mat Gallagher