How to play Wordle: the 30-second rules and the 5-minute strategy
Wordle is a five-letter daily word puzzle. The rules take 30 seconds. The strategy takes a week to internalize and another week to do well. Here’s both, applied to Melio Wordle (which uses an independent answer pool from the New York Times).
The rules in 30 seconds
You have six guessesto find a hidden five-letter word. Every guess must be a real English word; we won’t let you submit gibberish. After each guess, the tiles change color to tell you how close you are.
What the colors mean
Each of your five letters lights up in one of three colors:
- AGreen:the letter is in the answer AND it’s in the right position. Lock it in for your next guess.
- EYellow: the letter is in the answer but in a different position. Move it.
- TGray:the letter isn’t in the answer at all. (One exception: if the letter appears twice in your guess but only once in the answer, the second copy goes gray.)
The strategy in 60 seconds
Most strong Wordle players follow the same pattern. It’s not complicated:
- Use a vowel-heavy opener. Words with three vowels and two common consonants (ADIEU, AUDIO, ARISE, OUIJA) cover the most ground in one move. By the end of guess #1 you usually know which two vowels are in play.
- For guess #2, target the consonants. If you have no greens or yellows yet, play something with R, S, T, N, L, C — the common-consonant set — that doesn’t reuse any letter from guess #1.
- Once you have a green or two, stop playing for information and start playing words that respect the constraints. Move yellows to new positions; keep greens locked.
- If you have 3-4 letters confirmed but no answer, look for the unusual letter that could still fit. The single hardest part of Wordle is when you have _ATCH and the missing letter is something weird like M (MATCH) instead of the obvious P or B.
What a 'good' Wordle score looks like
The community uses a rough distribution:
- 1/6 or 2/6: lucky. The answer happened to be one of the few words you tried early. Worth bragging about.
- 3/6: very strong. You played the information game well and converged fast.
- 4/6: the median. A normal day’s solve.
- 5/6 or 6/6: harder day, or you got stuck on a tricky pattern. Still a win.
- X/6: failed to find the answer in six tries. Happens to everyone.
Hard mode
Hard mode adds one rule: any letter you’ve revealed as green or yellow must appear in every subsequent guess. Greens stay in position; yellows have to show up somewhere new.
Hard mode rewards careful play and punishes information-gathering guesses. Most players don’t need it; switch it on if you find normal mode too easy. We’ve got a dedicated guide: Wordle hard mode strategy →
How Melio's Wordle differs from the NYT's
Melio Wordle uses an independently-curated answer pool. The format and rules are identical (five letters, six guesses, same color logic), but the daily answer isn’t the same as the NYT’s on any given day. We did this on purpose so we could ship a daily Wordle without depending on or copying NYT.
You can browse past Melio Wordle answers or look at any specific date’s answer with hint ladders at /wordle/past-answers. The full accepted word list is at /wordle/word-list.