How to play Five letters
Five letters is a guessing game with a memory: every word you try comes back coloured, and the colours are all the board ever says. Read them well and a word falls in three or four tries; read them loosely and it takes ten — which here is allowed, since the tries are not rationed.
This page is about the reading. Four short lessons, simplest first, each acted out on a small board you can step through at your own pace — among them the one rule that trips almost everybody once: a letter the word has that still comes back grey.
How to play
Guess the day’s five-letter word. There is no limit on tries.
Every guess must be a real word; after each one the tiles show how close you came.
When the six rows fill, the board asks whether to keep going: your last guess moves up to the top and five fresh rows open under it.
Share it at the end and every row you played goes with it, all of them together.
Two things the board does not do. It never tells you how many of a letter the word holds — that you work out from the tiles, and the second lesson below is about exactly that. And it never runs out of patience: when the six rows fill, your last guess moves to the top and five fresh rows open under it, so a guess spent on finding out is never a guess wasted.
Three colours, one guess
Type any real five-letter word and press enter. Each tile then takes one of three colours, and each colour is a sentence about that letter in that spot.
A repeated letter
The one thing worth knowing before anything else. Grey means “not in the word” — except when your guess holds the same letter twice. Then the tiles are counting, and a grey copy means “not a second time”.
Yellow is a place, not just a letter
A yellow tile is easy to read as “good, that letter is in” and leave at that. It says more: the letter is in the word and it is not in this column. Every yellow rules out one spot, and moving the letter on the next guess is how it turns green.
The first word, and a guess that cannot win
The opening guess knows nothing, so let it ask a lot: five different letters, all of them common. And when the word is still wide open after it, the strongest second move is often a word that cannot possibly be right — because tries are not rationed here, a guess spent purely on finding out costs nothing.
No timer. Leave and come back — it’s saved.
Play today’s word