How to Play Wordle: Complete Beginner's Guide (2026)
Wordle is a free daily word puzzle published by the New York Times in which you have six attempts to guess a secret five-letter word. The puzzle resets every day at midnight, all players worldwide solve the same word, and your results can be shared as a spoiler-free emoji grid. If you have just started playing or want to make sure you understand all the rules correctly, this guide covers everything from the color system to your first strategic moves.
The Basic Rules
Each guess must be a real English word that the NYT Wordle dictionary recognizes — you cannot type random letters. After you submit a guess by pressing Enter, the tiles change color to show how close you are. You have six guesses per puzzle. A new puzzle appears every day at midnight in your local time zone. As of 2026, the game is played at nytimes.com/games/wordle and requires a free NYT account to track your stats and streak, though you can play without one (stats just will not be saved).
What Green, Yellow, and Gray Mean
Green means the letter is in the answer AND it is in the correct position. Keep it exactly there in future guesses. Yellow means the letter IS in the answer, but it is in the wrong position in your current guess — you need to move it somewhere else. Gray means the letter is not in the answer at all; remove it from your future guesses entirely. Reading these colors correctly is the entire skill of the game. A useful shorthand: green means 'correct and locked', yellow means 'right letter, wrong place', gray means 'eliminate this letter'.
Your First Three Guesses: A Simple Framework
For beginners, a reliable three-guess framework works well until you develop your own approach. Guess 1: use CRANE or STARE (high-frequency letters, easy to read the result). Guess 2: based on what came back from guess 1, choose a word that tests entirely different letters — something like POUTY or BOLTS if guess 1 returned mostly gray. Guess 3: now you have the positions of several letters and a map of what is absent. Use this to form the most likely word that fits all the green and yellow constraints. This framework reliably produces a solve by guess 4 or 5 for most puzzles.
How Streaks and Stats Work
The NYT tracks your Wordle statistics including total games played, win percentage, current streak, and maximum streak, as well as a guess distribution bar chart showing how many times you solved in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 guesses. Your streak increments by one each day you solve the puzzle. Miss a single day and your streak resets to zero — there is no makeup or grace period. Stats are tied to your NYT account when signed in, which means they sync across devices. If you play without logging in, your stats are stored locally in your browser and will be lost if you clear cookies or switch browsers.
Hard Mode: What It Is and Whether Beginners Should Use It
Hard Mode is available in the settings and enforces two extra rules: confirmed green letters must stay in their position in all future guesses, and yellow letters must appear in every future guess. Beginners should play Normal Mode first. Hard Mode removes the ability to make pure information-gathering guesses that ignore confirmed letters, which is a key tool for learning the game. Once you are regularly solving in four guesses or fewer, Hard Mode is a natural next challenge — it makes the game meaningfully harder without requiring any external resources.
Sharing Your Results Without Spoilers
The share button at the end of each game copies a spoiler-free emoji grid to your clipboard. The grid uses colored squares (green, yellow, and black/gray) in the same pattern as your guesses, showing your path to the solution without revealing any letters. Sharing these grids on social media is a Wordle tradition — the format makes it easy to compare how friends solved the same puzzle without ruining it for anyone who has not played yet. A solve in three guesses will look like three rows of squares; a failed solve shows six rows ending without all greens.
FAQ
Is Wordle free to play?
Yes. Wordle is free to play at nytimes.com/games/wordle. A free NYT account is needed to save your stats and streak. You do not need a paid NYT subscription to play Wordle.
Is there only one Wordle per day?
Yes. There is exactly one puzzle per day, and every player in the world gets the same word. The puzzle refreshes at midnight in your local time zone.
What happens if I do not solve the puzzle?
Your streak resets to zero, your loss is recorded in your stats, and the answer is revealed after your sixth wrong guess. The next day's puzzle begins normally.
Can I play previous Wordle puzzles?
The NYT does not offer an official archive mode for past puzzles. Third-party sites host Wordle archives, though these are unofficial and their word lists may differ from the NYT's.
Does Wordle use British or American English spellings?
The NYT Wordle uses American English spellings. Words like COLOUR, FAVOUR, and GREY (as a spelling variant) follow American conventions (COLOR, FAVOR, GRAY).