Wurdle

Wurdle is our take on the now-classic 5-letter guessing format that Wordle made famous. We didn't reinvent the rules — they're already great — but we did want a version with no daily lock, no account, and no nudging you toward a subscription. Type a guess, read the colours, type another. That's it.

A few things help once you're past beginner tier. Open with a vowel-heavy word — RAISE, ADIEU, AUDIO — to triangulate the vowels fast. On your second guess, deliberately use letters you didn't try in your opener; don't try to guess the answer yet, just gather information. The most common opening mistake is treating your second guess like a Hail Mary. You usually want two guesses of pure information-gathering before you start committing.

Pay attention to letter position frequency, not just letter frequency. The letter R is very common in 5-letter words, but it's far more likely to appear in position 2 or 5 than in position 1 or 4. When a letter comes back yellow (in the word, wrong position), don't just shove it into any unfilled slot — think about where the letter likes to be. There are letter-frequency-by-position tables online; we have one taped to the monitor.

About 12% of five-letter words have a double letter, and the double is almost always a common vowel (E, O) or L. If you've used four guesses and the puzzle still isn't yielding, ask yourself whether the answer might have a repeat. Words that look weird at first glance — MOOSE, LEVEL, PILLS, NIECE — are surprisingly common answers.

Build notes. The word list comes from a public corpus of common English five-letter words with proper nouns and obscure terms filtered out. We split it into two lists: a smaller pool of plausible answer words, and a larger pool of valid guess words. This is the same approach Wordle uses and it matters — it means the answer is always a word you actually know, while you can still try slightly unusual guesses to gather information.

For a deeper strategy guide, we wrote up a longer post on how to lower your average guess count. If you want a different word puzzle entirely, try Associations for thematic grouping or Cowboy Hangman for the classic single-letter game.

One last note: if you find yourself stuck at a fixed average, write down your openers and your guess counts for a week. Patterns will appear that you wouldn't spot in isolation. The biggest improvements come from noticing your own bad habits.