How to Master (or Cheat at) Wordle, the Internet’s Favourite Word Game of 2022

The internet loves two things: A fresh trend, and word games. Wordle is both, and even has a love story in the mix. On Sunday, the second day of 2022, the online word game went viral and was played by more than 300,000 people.

It started out as a word guessing game created by Jost Wardle, a software engineer based in Brooklyn, for his partner who loves word games. Since then, you’ve likely seen people tweeting blocks of grey, green, and yellow. If you waant to be a part of the fun, here’s how Wordle works.

How to play (and share) Wordle

Wordle is a once-a-day puzzle game that lives on a simple, ad-free website. It starts you off with six blank rows of five boxes each. The game doesn’t give you any letters to start off with, and your goal is to completely guess the word before your six guesses are up.

After you guess a word (and it has to be a real word, not random letters), the letters will turn into either grey, yellow, or green.

• Grey means that the letter is not in the word at all.
• Yellow means the letter is in the word, just not where you guessed it.
• Green means that the letter is in the exact place where you guessed it.

Once you understand the rules, it’s simply a game of elimination. Start off with a word, and just see if you can get yellow or green tiles (if you’re new to word games, we’ve got a hack for you below).

Once you’ve guessed the word, you’ll see a popup with your streak, scores, and a countdown for the next Wordle. You can click “Share” to copy your score in visual emojis, paste it in a tweet, and send it along. Then you’re addicted and come back to try it out each day.

How to master Wordle, even if you suck at word games

If, like me, you suck at word games, here’s some good news: Wordle has quite a range. Word game lovers can get competitive with it, but if you’re a beginner, there are a couple of tricks you can use to guess the word correctly by the third or fourth try.

The great thing here is that you’re limited to only guessing five-letter words, so your best strategy is to guess words using the most common letters in the English alphabet. Try words that include the letters e0 T, a, i, o, n, s, h, and r. And, most commonly, words start with the letters t, a, o, d, and w.

Here are some suggestions for words you should start out with: siren, octal, abuse, and so on. Here’s a list of the world’s most common five-letter words.

After your first or second try with this, you’ll probably get two or three yellow or green tries. You’ll also know which letters not to include.

Then you can start off the elimination process on your own. You can obviously use Google (for my puzzle, I searched “five-letter words containing ‘nal’,” or you can rely on a wonderful site like Word Hippo.

Here, you can filter words that contain certain letters, and you can even use the advanced filters to define letters in the beginning, middle, or end of the words. Using this list, you’ll find the right word in no time. Once you do it a couple of times, you’ll have the confidence to solve Wordle without any help.