Wordle Strategy: Using Green, Yellow and Grey Clues

Good Wordle play is about information, not luck. Each guess turns five letters into green, yellow and grey clues, and the best guesses are the ones whose clues rule out the most remaining words. If you open with common letters, read the feedback carefully (repeated letters especially) and choose follow-up guesses that test new letters, most puzzles fall in three or four rows.

What the colours really tell you

• Green: this letter is in the answer at exactly this position.
• Yellow: this letter is in the answer, but not at this position.
• Grey: this letter is not in the answer, or at least no additional copy of it is.

That last caveat matters. If you guess a word with two Es and the answer has one E, only one of your Es is coloured and the other turns grey. A grey letter therefore means “no more copies than the coloured ones you already have”, not always “absent”. Yellow also carries two pieces of information: the letter is present and it is not in that column, which is why our Wordle solver asks for yellow letters per position.

Choosing a first guess

A strong opener uses five different letters that appear often in five-letter words. Counting letters across the solver's US word list, the most common are S, E, A, R, O, I, L, T and N, but S is heavily inflated by plurals, which Wordle rarely uses as answers. That is why popular openers favour E, A, R, T and L:

• CRANE, TRACE, SLATE, STARE: common consonants with two vowels.
• ADIEU, AUDIO: vowel-heavy openers that find vowels fast but tell you less about consonants.

There is no single “best” word for every player. What matters more is using the same sensible opener consistently, so you learn how to follow it up.

The second guess

Unless you play Hard Mode (where revealed hints must be reused), your second guess does not need to fit the clues. It often pays to choose a word with five new letters. After CRANE, for example, a guess like DOILY or MOIST tests a fresh set of common letters. Two openers that between them cover ten different letters will reveal most of the answer's letters in the majority of games.

A worked example

Suppose you open with CRANE. The A turns green in the middle, the E turns yellow at the end, and C, R and N are grey. Entering those clues in the Wordle solver with the US dictionary leaves 74 possibilities, including BEAST, DEATH, HEAVY, LEAPT and MEATY.

You guess LEAST next. E, A, S and T go green; L is grey. Only BEAST, FEAST and YEAST still fit. This is the classic Wordle trap: one unknown letter with several candidates. Guessing them in turn could take three more rows. A better third guess is a word that tests the candidate letters B, F and Y together, such as BEEFY. A green B means BEAST, a yellow F means FEAST and a yellow Y means YEAST, so the colours give you the answer for the next row.

Common mistakes

• Reusing grey letters. It sounds obvious, but in the moment it is easy to guess a word containing a letter you have already ruled out.
• Ignoring yellow positions. A yellow R in position 2 means the R is somewhere else. Guessing another word with R in position 2 wastes information.
• Forgetting double letters. If nothing seems to fit, the answer may repeat a letter, as in SPEED, LLAMA, ABBEY or SASSY.
• Chasing rare words. Wordle answers are everyday words. When a solver lists several candidates, prefer the most familiar one.

Using a solver to learn

A solver is most valuable after the game. Enter the clues from each row of today's puzzle and look at how many words remained after every guess. If your second guess left 40 possibilities and another choice would have left 8, that is a lesson you can apply tomorrow. Note that our solver searches the complete Scrabble dictionaries, which include many words Wordle never uses, so the remaining count is an upper bound.

Beyond Wordle

The same deduction skills apply to every guess-the-word game, from the classic code-breaking game Mastermind to newer five-letter puzzles. If you enjoy the vocabulary side, try unscrambling letters with the word unscrambler, or read how to unscramble words for anagram techniques.