The guessing game that taught the world five-letter words
There's a particular pleasure in narrowing something down: three grey letters and a stray yellow feel like nothing, and two guesses later the word is suddenly inevitable. This page serves that pleasure without rationing it — no once-a-day limit, four word lengths, and a way to hand any word you just played to a friend.
- 2,683 hand-curated secret words across the four lengths — everyday words only
- 51,225 words you're allowed to guess with, so a real word is never refused
- 0 daily limits, countdowns or accounts — play as many as you like
How the colors work — including the sneaky duplicates
Type any real word of the right length and press Enter. Each letter comes back green (right letter, right spot), yellow (in the word, but somewhere else) or grey (not in the word at all). The keyboard underneath remembers everything you've learned so far. Mistyped one letter? Tap any square in the current row to put the cursor there and fix just that spot — no backspacing through the whole word. And if a guess isn't in our dictionary, the letters clear themselves away and the row is yours to try again.
Four lengths, four different games
Five letters is the classic for a reason: English holds thousands of common five-letter words, so deduction stays genuinely open until the last few rows. But it isn't the only way to play.
| Length | Guesses | Secret words | How it plays |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 letters | 6 | 648 | Quick and friendly — but short words hide fewer clues per guess, so it stays tactical |
| 5 letters | 6 | 856 | The classic. Deduction stays open until the last few rows |
| 6 letters | 7 | 682 | Each guess carries more information; the word falls faster once you are rolling |
| 7 letters | 7 | 497 | Less like a lottery, more like a crossword answer assembling itself |
The long modes get a seventh guess to keep them fair rather than punishing. If you've only ever played five, try seven.
Openers, and what actually matters
Everyone has a favourite first word, and most of the good ones share a shape: two or three vowels plus the workhorse consonants R, S, T, L and N. Rather than repeat the folklore, we played every candidate against all 856 five-letter secret words on this page and counted the squares each one lights up.
What an opener actually tells you
Average number of coloured squares — greens and yellows together — each opener returns against the answer list.
- STARE 1.90
- RAISE 1.86
- SLATE 1.78
- CRANE 1.76
- ADIEU 1.51
- FUZZY 0.38
STARE comes out top at 1.90 squares a go and draws a blank on only 7% of answers. FUZZY is in there as a control: it manages 0.38 and comes back completely grey 66% of the time. The gap between a good opener and a bad one is roughly two squares — about one whole guess.
In the longer modes, spread wider — an opener like ORANGES or MIRACLE touches seven different letters, and in seven-letter games coverage beats position early on. The second guess is where players split: chasing the yellows you found, or playing a fresh set of untested letters. Against a stubborn board, burning a guess purely for information is usually the faster route, and it's the habit that separates four-row solvers from six-row survivors.
Whatever you open with, use what the grid already told you. The most common leak isn't a bad opener; it's replaying a letter the board has already returned grey. Glance at the keyboard before each guess — it's doing the bookkeeping for you.
Hard mode, for purists
Flip on hard mode and every clue you uncover becomes binding: greens must stay put and yellows must be reused in your next guess. It removes the information-burning trick above, which is exactly the point — you're committing to solve by deduction alone, the way the strictest players do. Turn it on before your first guess; changing the rules mid-round wouldn't be fair to either of you.
Unlimited on purpose — and challenge links
There's no daily ration here and no midnight countdown. Words are dealt at random from a hand-curated answer list — everyday words only, no obscurities dredged up to make a puzzle look clever — and your browser quietly avoids re-dealing anything you've seen recently. When a round ends you can copy the classic spoiler-free emoji grid, and — the fun part — a challenge link that opens this page with the exact word you just played, so "how many did it take you?" becomes a fair fight. The link hides the word from prying eyes, and your address bar stays clean while you play.
If the shared-word ritual is the bit you actually want — one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, with a streak riding on it — that lives at the daily word guess. The two keep entirely separate records, so a run of bad luck in one costs nothing in the other.
Wins, streaks and your guess distribution are tracked per word length and saved on your device — no account, nothing sent anywhere. Since every round is opt-in, your streak here counts consecutive wins, not consecutive days showing up. Giving up shows you the word but voids the round; the stats only ever count honest solves, which is house policy across every game on this site. There's a high-contrast palette in the settings, too, which swaps green and yellow for orange and blue if the standard colours are hard to tell apart.
Where this little game came from
Guess-my-word games are far older than the internet. Victorian parlours had letter-by-letter deduction games; the 1970s gave us Jotto on paper and Mastermind's coloured pegs; game shows like Lingo put the green-and-yellow grid on television decades before it conquered phones. The 2021 phenomenon — a programmer's gift to his partner that briefly became the most shared puzzle on Earth — added the two ingredients that made it viral: one shared word, and a spoiler-free way to brag. This page keeps the brag and un-rations the puzzle; the daily keeps the ration for anyone who wants the ritual back.
If you're enjoying this
The same no-signup, play-forever philosophy runs through the rest of WordiBop: endless mini crosswords, themed word searches you can print, and two genuinely daily puzzles — the daily word search and daily crossword — for when you do want a streak with a calendar attached.