Tuesday, August 4, 2026 · #1
Word Guess— Tuesday, August 4, 2026
About Word Guess
Word Guess gives you six attempts to find a hidden five-letter word. Every guess you enter has to be a real word, and every guess comes back marked: green where a letter is right and in the right place, amber where the letter is in the word but somewhere else, grey where the letter is not in the word at all. Six rows is enough information to deduce almost any answer — the skill is in choosing guesses that convert unknowns into facts as fast as possible.
The answer pool is deliberately curated. There are 2,052 everyday words that can be the answer, so you will never lose to an obscure botanical term, but the game accepts more than 6,000 legal five-letter words as guesses. That gap is a feature: it means you can spend a guess on a word you would never expect to be the answer purely to test five new letters, which is the single strongest tactic in the game.
Words are dealt rather than drawn. Instead of picking at random each day — which, thanks to the birthday paradox, would repeat a word every couple of months — the entire pool is shuffled into a running order and dealt one word per day. Every word is used exactly once before any of them returns, so the same answer will not come round again for well over five years. The puzzle is generated from the date itself, so everyone in the world sees the same word on the same day, and the archive stays correct forever.
How to play Word Guess
- 1Type any legal five-letter word and press Enter to submit your first guess.
- 2Read the colours: green means that letter is correct and in the correct position, amber means the letter is in the word but in a different position, grey means the letter does not appear at all.
- 3Use what each row tells you to narrow the possibilities, then enter your next guess.
- 4Keep letters you have proven green in the same slot, and move amber letters somewhere new — an amber letter in the same position is a wasted slot.
- 5Watch the on-screen keyboard: it accumulates the colour of every letter you have tried, so you can see at a glance which letters are still live.
- 6You have six guesses in total. Solve it before you run out and the puzzle is yours for the day.
- 7Come back after midnight UTC for a new word, or open the archive to play any previous day.
Word Guess strategy
- Open with a vowel-rich word. Starters like ADIEU, AUDIO, OUIJA and RAISE test three or four of the five vowels in one go, and since almost every answer contains at least one vowel — most contain two — you rarely waste the guess.
- Follow up with the common consonants. After the vowels, the letters that appear most often in five-letter words are R, S, T, L, N and C. A pairing like AUDIO then STERN, or RAISE then CLOUT, covers ten distinct high-frequency letters in two rows and usually leaves only a handful of candidates.
- Do not repeat letters in your first two guesses. A word like MAMMA tests three letters, not five. Save doubled letters for later, when you have positive evidence that a letter appears twice — for example when a letter is green in one slot and amber in another.
- Spend guess three as a probe if you are still unsure. If four candidate answers differ only in their first letter, a guess that contains several of those first letters — even one that cannot possibly be the answer — will eliminate all but one in a single row. Information beats optimism when you still have three rows left.
- Pay attention to endings. A huge share of five-letter words end in -ER, -LY, -ED, -ES, -CH, -CK or -NT, and word-initial clusters like ST-, CH-, SH-, TH-, BR-, CR- and PL- are far more common than the alphabet would suggest. If you have an amber R, ask yourself whether it belongs in a -ER ending or a BR/CR/TR opening.
- On your last guess, stop optimising and start counting. List every word that fits the constraints you have proven, then pick the one whose letters you have not already ruled out anywhere else. Guessing a word that contradicts a grey letter is the most common way a solved puzzle gets thrown away.
Recent Word Guess puzzles
Every past puzzle is still playable, and each has its own hints and answer page.
Word Guess — common questions
How often does the same word come back?
Not for years. The answer pool is shuffled into a full running order and dealt one word per day, so all 2,052 words are used before any of them repeats. That is a cycle of roughly five and a half years, and when it does come round the order is reshuffled from scratch.
Why was my guess rejected?
Guesses have to be five letters long and appear on the accepted word list, which holds over 6,000 legal words. Proper nouns, abbreviations and hyphenated forms are not on it. If a word you are sure about is missing, it is usually because it is a proper noun or a very regional spelling.
Can the answer contain the same letter twice?
Yes, and it is a classic trap. When a letter is doubled you may see it green in one position and amber in another, or you may see one copy marked grey if you guessed it more times than it actually appears. Treat grey as "no more of this letter", not always as "none at all".
What is the best starting word?
There is no single best answer, but the strongest openers combine three vowels with two common consonants. RAISE, SLATE, CRANE, AUDIO and ADIEU all perform well. What matters more than the exact word is that your first two guesses share no letters, so together they test ten different ones.
Is everyone playing the same word?
Yes. The puzzle is a pure function of the UTC date, so every player who opens the same day sees the same word, with no accounts, servers or stored state involved. The archive regenerates old puzzles from their dates and always produces exactly what was published.
What happens if I run out of guesses?
The word is revealed and you can head straight to the archive for another puzzle. The answers page for each date also gives you progressive hints — how many vowels there are, then the first letter, then the last letter and the consonant-vowel pattern — so you can take the smallest nudge that gets you moving again.
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