Wordle Strategy: Top Tips & Tricks to Swiftly Solve Every Puzzle
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Use the Best Wordle Words First
As we’ve covered in a different article, you need to be smart about the Wordle starting words you choose to play. Starting with words with less-common letters or words with duplicate letters are great ways to waste your precious and limited turns. The New York Times carefully curates its list of Wordle answers, so obscure words are unlikely too. Keep these tips and tricks in mind as you develop your own gameplay strategy.
Guessing with random words, unless you’re all out of options, is never a good idea. (Unless you want to do so for the chaotic fun of it. If so, have at it.)
The first word you play should be a word that uses either a lot of vowels or a lot of common consonants. Words like “adieu,” “roate,” “teams” and “worst” tend to yield the most results in the first turn. You should get a good mix of green and yellow letter tiles.
Using these five-letter words first also makes it easy to figure out which Wordle words to use second. The second word doesn’t need to be the most ideal word. But, as long as you use a word that doesn’t contain any letters from the first one, you’ll have played 10 unique letters in the first two turns.
What also makes these words useful on the first turn is that many contain common letter combinations. Pairings like TH, CK, NK, ED, EA and ST are used a lot in English. Playing words that use these letter pairs might help you find the correct letters and their locations.
Play Your Words at the Right Time
Paired with the first Wordle strategy is the understanding to play the right words at the right time. What this means is that as you take your turns, you need to pay attention to what letters you’ve already played and what other letters could go with them. That's the only way you'll solve the hardest Wordle words when they come up.
During your first two turns, the reason you want to play “adieu,” “roate” and other such words is to use all five vowels as quickly as possible. This will give you plenty of turns to figure out the accompanying consonants and where they go, even if you only see a yellow tile or two to start.
Remember that some Wordle puzzle answers might have duplicate letters. This can be tricky to figure out, especially when you’ve used a few of your turns already.
Typically, a word with duplicate letters will have either very few vowels or the letter order does not allow for many options. When that happens, look for chances to use one of your letters twice.
Use the Green and Yellow Letter Tiles Effectively
When you play a letter that is in the answer, it will turn yellow or green. A yellow tile means that it’s part of the word but in the wrong spot. A green tile means that it is part of the Wordle word and already in the correct spot.
Consider these Wordle tips and tricks for how to leverage this information as part of your overall Wordle strategy.
After your first word (and possibly second word), you can choose to play a word that uses every revealed letter. If you are confident that you know enough words that they might form together, you can potentially answer the puzzle in very few turns. This is also how Wordle’s “hard mode” works.
The next option goes in the opposite direction. You can play a word that contains none of the letters you found in your previous word. This Wordle strategy typically won’t let you find the answer quickly, but using five brand-new letters can help you more thoroughly deduce the answer.
Remember that position matters. If the letter “E” lights up yellow in the second position, you may want to avoid guessing words where the second letter is E. Instead, play words with E in other spots, like ERASE or HAZEL. Wordle tips and tricks like this ensure you maximize the information you can glean from your guesses.
Develop Your Vocabulary to Improve Your Wordle Strategy
To win Wordle consistently, you need to know a lot of words. That means you need to develop your vocabulary by memorizing some word lists. This takes time, dedication and practice, but the benefits are worth it. And those benefits extend past winning word games. Enriching your vocabulary is worth it for the sake of exercising your mind and increasing your knowledge, too.
To enhance your vocabulary, you need to learn the right words.
Studying our five-letter word list is a great starting point for Wordle. Wordle only uses the more common five-letter words, but that’s still thousands of different possibilities. Luckily, you can find them all in our list, which you can sort alphabetically.
Looking at unique situations, like words without vowels, can reduce or even eliminate the potential frustration of finding more unique Wordle answers.
Going to other word lists or word memorization tools can help. One suggestion is to use the program Zyzzyva. Many competitive Scrabble players use this tool to memorize their expansive word lists, such as the NASPA word list. You can modify your word lists to focus entirely on five-letter words for Wordle.
Use WordFinder’s Wordle Solver
When all else fails and you’re stumped on what word to play, we’re here to help. Our Wordle solver page will help you make quick work of even the game’s most perplexing puzzles.
To find the right word, start by typing the letters you have in the correct positions in the corresponding space. These are your green tiles.
Next, enter any letters you've correctly identified in the “Includes” search field. This can include all the letters you have in both green and/or yellow squares in the game.
Type all of the letters you know are not part of the word into the “Excludes” search field. That’s all of the letters in the dark gray squares. You can add up to 25 excluded letters.
Hit the Search button to generate a complete list of all valid Wordle words that match your letters.
NOTE: Filling all the search fields is not required. You can search for words using only the "Correct Position" square, only the “Includes” option, only the “Excludes” field, or any combination of the three if you’d like. Get some Wordle hints if you need extra help. And if you'd rather skip ahead, we've got today's Wordle answer waiting for you too.
Play Wordle-Like Games for Fun and Practice
Like any worthwhile word game, Josh Wardle’s Wordle game takes planning and skill if you want to excel at it. Testing your Wordle strategy also takes a fair amount of practice. That’s why it helps to play extra puzzles while waiting for the next daily Wordle puzzle. How do you do that? By playing games similar to Wordle, of course!
For a lot of people, being able to play Wordle only once per day isn’t enough. We wanted to play more as well, so we did you a favor and found a number of Wordle-like games, like Quordle. They both offer a different experience and provide valuable practice for the daily challenges.
Zac Pricener has been a content creator for the past eight years. He’s a bit of an all-around nerd, and he has a bad habit of working movie and TV show references into conversations whenever possible.
