Wordle Strategy Guide

Your first two guesses are usually best spent testing as many common, distinct letters as possible rather than trying to guess the answer outright. If your opener is STARE and none of those letters turn green, a strong second guess tests a completely different set of common letters, such as CLOUD or MINCY, rather than reusing letters you already know are wrong.

Once you have two or three green or yellow letters locked in, shift from pure elimination toward guesses that could plausibly be the actual answer, since you now have enough constraints that a well-chosen guess has a real chance of being correct.

A common mistake is guessing a word that reuses a letter you already confirmed is grey, just because it fits a pattern you're considering. Every grey letter you've already seen should be crossed off mentally (or filtered out using the solver) so your remaining guesses only test genuinely new information.

When a word you're considering has a repeated letter, think carefully about what a grey or yellow result would actually tell you. If you already know a word contains exactly one E from a previous green, guessing a word with two E's risks an ambiguous or misleading result, since Wordle will only mark as many copies as truly appear in the answer.

In hard mode, every green or yellow letter revealed so far must be included in your next guess, which limits how much pure information-testing you can do later in the game. Under hard mode, it often makes sense to pick a second guess that still respects known constraints but tries a genuinely different arrangement of the remaining unknown letters, rather than a word chosen purely for elimination.

With one guess left and multiple words still fitting your clues, look for the most common word among the candidates rather than an obscure one — Wordle answers skew toward everyday vocabulary, so between two equally valid options, the more familiar word is usually the safer bet.