How to play Wordle: Starting words, tips & tricks

❘ Updated: 2023-03-31T06:00:00

Josh Wordle / New York Times

If Wordle has you confused and wondering how to master the skills of word-guessing, don’t worry. Our guide has you covered with all the tips & tricks that you need to show off your Wordle streak to your peers in the game.

Wordle has been around for quite a while now and it laid the foundation for the rise of other games like Wordle in 2024. Having become a household activity to solve for the Wordle word of the day and see who takes fewer guesses, the game has become a daily source of fun for many people across the globe.

If you’re yet to jump on the Wordle hype train and have been wondering how to get started, don’t worry. We have you covered with a guide featuring everything that you need to know about how to play Wordle — including tips for mastering this unique and fun word-guessing game.

Alternatively, if you’re trying to get some inspiration for today’s Wordle answer, make sure to check out yesterday’s Wordle guide to help point you in the right direction.

Contents

How to play Wordle
Wordle tips and tricks
Wordle word tips
How to play Wordle on iPhone
Does Wordle have an app

Here are some tips and tricks for how to play Wordle each day.

How to play Wordle

All you need to do to start playing Wordle is to visit the New York Times website and start guessing. Wordle can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere, as long as they have a working internet connection.

The game’s words are updated daily, and once you have found the mystery word of the day, you will have to wait until the next day for another shot.

However, before you start guessing, you should note what the different colors in Wordle mean:

Green: This color appears when you guess the accurate position of a specific letter in the word.
Yellow: This color appears when you guess a letter accurately but get its position wrong in the word.
Gray: This color appears when you guess a letter that is not present in the word at all.

Make sure to remember what each color stands for in Wordle.

Wordle tips and tricks

Given that Wordle is a guessing game at the end of the day, the main objective is to guess the word accurately in as few attempts as possible. There are a few methods you can try to give yourself a headstart when you attempt to guess your next word:

Avoid repeating letters that have already been marked in gray.
Yellow-marked letters in the same position should be avoided so you don’t lose out on your limited chances.
Remember that the same letter can appear twice in a word. This means that if a specific letter appears to be green, it doesn’t mean that the same letter cannot appear again in the word.
Try and focus on vowels for the first guess. Words like ‘adieu’, ‘audio’, ‘canoe’, and ‘house’ offer at least three individual vowels for you to check before planning your second guess.

Wordle word tips

A lot of five-letter words have already been used up in Wordle, making it even more difficult to guess new words on each rotation. For this reason, you can check out our archive of daily Wordle answers to ensure that you’re not repeating any previous words.

Apart from that, we have a few tricks for you to use when guessing the Wordle word of the day. These tricks mainly involve guessing the starting and ending letters of the word.

Some of the most common starting combinations for five-letter words are:

Other than that, some of the most common ending combinations for five-letter words are:

Finally, be sure to try out several common vowel combinations in order to guess the daily Wordle word of the day much quicker. These vowel combinations include:

How to play Wordle on iPhone

Wordle doesn’t have an official iPhone app yet, but there are a couple of methods using which you can play the word guessing game on your iOS devices. While the first method involves opening the official NY Times Wordle webpage, the other method allows you to create a web app that can be directly accessed from your App Library.

However, before getting started with the web app creation, you should note that your Wordle streak won’t carry over from your iPhone’s web browser. Having said that here are the steps you need to follow to create the Wordle web app on your iPhone:

Launch Safari and head over to the official Wordle website.
Tap on the “Add to Home Screen” button after the webpage loads. It is the button located in the center of the toolbar.
You should be able to find the Wordle web app with the official logo in your App Library.

screenshot of the add to home screen button on iphones

Click on the button marked in red to add the Wordle web app to your Library.

Once you have added the web app, you will be able to access the Wordle website directly by tapping the app icon.\

Does Wordle have an app

No, Wordle does not have an app.

A bunch of people might end up looking up the game on the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. You might even get results for a bunch of apps claiming to be Wordle but they’re all fake or different versions of the game and the only definitive way to play the original Wordle is through through The New York Times’ website.

So, there you have it — that’s everything you need to about how to play Wordle.

Here are some different Wordle games to pique your interest too