Five Tips Every Wordle Player Should Know
Wordle’s main advantage is its simplicity: anyone can look at five empty cells and come up with a five-letter word. But when it comes to successfully playing Wordle and enjoying it over time, a few tips might come in handy. I have a nearly 100% win rate at Wordle—more on win rates below—so here are a few of mine.
Never try to guess letters you already know.
If I could give just one piece of strategic advice, it would be this: your first guess, and even your second and third, shouldn’t be attempts to solve the puzzle. Instead, you should be gathering information about possible solutions.
This means that if you guess a word ending in “ER” and those letters turn green, you should n’t try to guess another word ending in “ER.” If you guess a completely different five-letter word, say, “BENCH,” you’ll be able to see whether the solution includes the letters B, N, C, and H, as well as whether the letter E appears in the second position (which will help you figure out whether words like LEVER and METER might be in the game).
The game interface has a toggle that requires each word to be composed of green squares obtained from previous guesses. It’s called “Hard Mode.” In my opinion, it should be called “Luck Mode,” because it deprives players of one of the best strategies: trying to guess letters already known is simply a waste of time.
I wrote more about this strategy here and provided more examples. Use this tip, and you’ll avoid the trap of losing after guessing the words FOUND, ROUND, POUND, MOUND, SOUND, and WOUND, when you could have used MARSH as a second guess and instantly found the answer (HOUND).
Choose the beginning with words containing common consonant sounds.
There are various schools of thought on choosing the best Wordle starter, and I’ve covered this in detail . But in short, the best advice is this: choose a word with five different letters (no repetitions) that includes at least two or three of the most common English consonants.
The most common consonants are T, N, S, H, R, D, L, and C. This means TRASH is a great place to start, as are CRANE, STEAL, and STARE. For best results, use E and/or A as vowels, as these are among the most common vowels in English.
Use two starting cards to get a powerful double hit.
The seed word should provide information about what the solution might contain, but five letters isn’t enough to glean much information. Therefore, I recommend using a different seed word that doesn’t overlap with the first but expands the scope of the information collected to 10 data points.
After all these years, my trusty pairing remains ARISE and TOUCH. This gives me all five vowels and a good set of the most common consonants, as discussed above. (The only notable absence is N, but I can always figure that out later.)
Feel free to come up with your own pair, where the second attempt fills in the gaps left by the first. If you’re starting with a word that contains a lot of vowels, like ADIEU, use more consonants in the second attempt: for example, THORN. Or, if you’re starting with TRASH, perhaps add OUNCE.
Play more matches without losing to get your winning percentage back to 100%.
I’m proud of my 100% win rate on Wordle, but the truth is, it’s currently at 99%. The New York Times’ About Wordle page says that “win rate takes into account the percentage of puzzles won out of the total number played,” but that doesn’t seem entirely accurate. It also doesn’t specify how the app handles rounding. I think I’ve lost three times in 1,368 games played, which would actually translate to a 99.8% win rate. But after each loss, my win rate eventually climbed back up to 100%.
Here’s what I found: once you lose, your 100% win rate drops to 99%. But if you win (I’m almost certain!) another 200 games in a row, you can claw that last percentage point back. I haven’t kept an exact count since my last loss, but I’m pretty sure I’ve played more than 100 games. And despite a few losses over the years, I’ve usually managed to maintain a 100% win rate.
Remember that past decisions can be used again as a basis.
For the first few years of its existence, Wordle never repeated a single solution. If you remembered seeing a particular word as a solution, it was guaranteed to be different from the one you saw that day. But that changed in February 2026, when the New York Times officially announced the ability to reuse previous solutions .
Isn’t the day you were looking for? Here’s the solution to today’s Wordle challenge.