Wordle gives you six guesses at a five-letter word, with green for a letter in the right place, yellow for a letter in the word but the wrong place, and grey for a letter that is not in the word at all (with a twist for duplicates, below). Most players stall around a four-guess average. These tips — the same principles the solvers run on — will pull your average down and save your streak on the hard days. You can use this Wordle Tips and Tricks free on IlmHunt — no sign-up needed, and it runs entirely in your browser.
Start with a letter-rich opener
Your first guess cannot be right often enough to matter; its real job is information. Choose an opener packed with the most common letters and three vowels: SLATE, CRANE and CRATE are the community’s analysed favourites for a reason — between them they test S, L, T, C, R, N and the vowels A and E. Avoid openers with rare letters (J, Q, Z, X) or duplicated letters: every repeated letter is a wasted test. If the opener strikes out completely, a second guess with five brand-new common letters (something like DOING or PRISM against a blank SLATE) maximises what you know before you start committing.
Read grey tiles correctly — the duplicate rule
The most misunderstood rule in Wordle: if the answer contains one E and you guess a word with two Es, one may turn yellow or green while the other shows grey — grey there means “no second E”, not “no E at all”. Similarly, a letter can be grey in a guess where it also appears coloured elsewhere in the same word. When your solver brain says “but it said E was out”, check whether E appeared twice in that guess before you exclude it from everything.
Use every clue, every turn
After each guess, your next word must respect all confirmed information: greens stay in their squares, yellows must appear somewhere else, and known-absent letters stay out — unless you are deliberately playing an information guess in a casual game (note Hard Mode, when on, enforces greens and yellows automatically). The classic streak-killer is re-placing a yellow letter in the same wrong square, or reusing a grey letter by accident. Slow down for ten seconds and audit your candidate word against every tile before submitting.
Learn the shapes of five-letter English
Five-letter answers follow patterns. A huge share end in E, S, Y or D; common endings include -ING shapes compressed to four usable letters plus one, -ER, -LY, -ED and -IGHT words like LIGHT and NIGHT. When you have _IGHT fixed and one guess left, enumerate the family: FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT — and if several remain live, play a word that tests their distinguishing letters together instead of gambling on one (in normal mode, a guess like FILMS can test F, L, M and S at once).
Respect the trap families
That last point deserves emphasis, because _IGHT, _ATCH, _OUND and _ORE families end more streaks than any hard word. When the remaining possibilities outnumber your remaining guesses, stop guessing family members one by one. Spend a turn on a probe word built from their differing letters; you will either hit the letter that identifies the answer or eliminate several candidates at once. It feels like wasting a guess. It is the opposite.
Build a small arsenal of second guesses
After a blank or near-blank opener, the game is about coverage: your second word should use five new letters, favouring the next tier of frequency — O, I, U, D, N, P, M. Two disciplined coverage guesses mean that by turn three you have usually tested 13–15 distinct letters including all five vowels, at which point most answers have nowhere to hide. Our list of 5 letter words shows the full field you are choosing from, and the Wordle Solver applies exactly this filtering when a puzzle has you cornered.
Play the long game with your streak
Finally, protect the streak psychologically: do not start a game you cannot finish calmly, and when a puzzle reaches guess five with multiple candidates, take the probe-word route rather than the coin flip. Thousands of players share scores each morning — the ones with the longest streaks are not the ones with the biggest vocabularies, they are the ones who never waste a tile. For harder variants, the same discipline scales up in our games like Wordle roundup and the Word Tools hub.