Wordle gives you six attempts to identify a five-letter word. Everyone in the world gets the same word on the same day, which is why results are comparable and why people share their grids. The puzzle is free and runs in a browser at The New York Times.
Every guess must be a real five-letter word — you cannot type five arbitrary letters to test them. After each guess the tiles change colour, and those colours are the only information you get.
The rule that trips up most players: a word can use the same letter twice. If you guess a word containing two of a letter and the answer holds only one, you will see one coloured tile and one grey tile for the same character. That grey does not mean the letter is absent — it means there is no second one.
A new Wordle appears at midnight in your own local time, so players in different time zones receive the same numbered puzzle at different moments. Our clues follow United States Eastern time, so the page flips at midnight ET.
Hard Mode, in the settings, forces every subsequent guess to reuse any letter you have already revealed: greens must stay in place and yellows must appear somewhere. It removes the option of spending a guess purely to gather information, which is a real tactic in normal mode. It makes the game harder in the literal sense, not merely stricter.
Stuck on today's puzzle? Our daily clues reveal one step at a time so you can take a nudge without seeing the answer.
MorningHint is an independent site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The New York Times Company. Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company. Word meanings are adapted from Wiktionary and reusable under CC BY-SA; all other content is ours. Contact: help.morninghint@gmail.com