Daily Word Guess

One word a day, and only one go at it

Everyone who opens this page today gets the same five-letter word and the same six tries. No account, no app, no midnight queue — just the one puzzle, and whatever you make of it before tomorrow.

• 856 words in the daily list, hand-picked and frozen — 2.3 years before any of them comes round again
• 6 tries, and no way to buy a seventh. Run out and the day is spent
• 27% of the words repeat a letter — the trap that costs more solvers a day than any obscure vocabulary

The one daily here you can actually lose

Our daily word search and daily crossword can be abandoned or revealed, but they can't beat you: the grid sits there until you finish it, and a revealed day can still be reclaimed by an honest solve later. This one is different, and deliberately so.

Six wrong guesses and it's over. The word is shown, the day goes down as unsolved, and there is no second attempt — because a second attempt would be played knowing the answer, which isn't a puzzle at all. That single rule is what makes the sixth guess feel the way it does.

• The other two dailies

  Time is the score.

  Everyone finishes eventually, so the interesting number is how fast. Reveal the answer and the day is void — but solve it honestly from scratch afterwards and you take the day back.

• This one

  Guesses are the score.

  Not everyone finishes, so the interesting number is how many tries it took — which is why the stats above are a distribution rather than a leaderboard. The clock still runs, but it's a footnote.

Where the day's word comes from

The daily draws from its own list of 856 words, frozen on the day this page launched and never edited since. That's unusual for this site — the other two dailies build their puzzles from word data that keeps growing — and it buys two things: curating the unlimited game's word lists can never disturb a single daily, and an archive puzzle from a year ago still deals exactly the word it dealt then.

Choosing from it is the part worth explaining. The obvious approach is to hash the date into a number and take that word — simple, stateless, and wrong, because hashing doesn't remember what it has already used. Instead the list is shuffled once, deterministically, and walked one word a day.

With the real salt and the real dates, hashing would have handed back a word you'd already had on day 59, and repeated itself 70 times in the first year — better than one day in six. Walking a shuffled order can't do that: it's a permutation, so every word is used once before any of them returns.

Hard mode is this daily's purist tier

The other dailies have hints and checks to decline; this game has nothing to refuse. What it has instead is hard mode — every green must stay put and every yellow must reappear in your next guess — which turns the fifth and sixth rows from a fishing expedition into a genuine deduction.

Solve the day in hard mode and it counts as a clean solve; that's what the purist trophies are counting.

Choose before your first guess. The switch locks once a word goes in, for the obvious reason: hard mode you can leave halfway isn't hard mode.

Streaks, the archive, and what counts

• Only today extends a streak Solving the archive is welcome and fills the calendar, but a streak is a record of turning up. Yesterday's word solved today counts for your totals and trophies, not for the run.
• A lost day is final Six wrong guesses, or pressing Give up, settles the date. It shows on the calendar as unsolved and breaks the streak — the archive can't be replayed once you've seen the answer.
• Your half-played day is saved Close the tab mid-guess and today's board comes back exactly as you left it, clock included. Everything lives in your own browser; there is no account and nothing is sent to us.
• The share gives nothing away Share result copies the coloured grid, your score out of 6 and your streak — no letters, no word. Safe to post before your friends have played.

Want more than one a day?

That's what the unlimited word guess is for: the same game with no daily rationing, in four, five, six and seven-letter modes, with challenge links that send a friend the exact word you just played. The two keep separate records, so a bad day here costs nothing there. And if it's the answer you want rather than another go, the five-letter word finder takes the board you're stuck on and lists what's still possible.

Building a streak habit? The daily word search and the daily crossword run on the same rules — one shared puzzle a day, their own calendars and trophy rooms, and no way to get ahead of tomorrow.