Five Letters
Game by WebDevSimplified · Licensed under MIT · Source
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About Five Letters
Five Letters is a daily word-deduction puzzle. The game picks a five-letter word at random. You have six guesses to figure out what it is. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are in the right position, which letters are in the word but in a different position, and which letters are not in the word at all. Use this feedback to narrow down the answer.
The format was popularized by a 2021 viral web game that swept social media. The original was acquired by a major newspaper in 2022 and remains one of the most-played casual word games on the internet. Five Letters is WebDevSimplified's MIT-licensed implementation of the same loop, included on this site with attribution and a link to the source.
The feedback system uses three colors. Green means a letter is correct and in the right position. Yellow means a letter is in the word but in a different position. Gray means the letter is not in the word at all. After each guess, every letter in your guess is colored according to these rules. The colors are the only feedback. There are no hints, no skip buttons, and no "almost" indicators.
Controls are type letters on a physical keyboard or use the on-screen keyboard. Press Enter to submit a guess. Press Backspace to delete a letter. The on-screen keyboard also colors letters based on what you have learned, so you can see at a glance which letters are eliminated, present, or in the right position.
The opening guess matters. Strong opening words use common letters: STARE, CRANE, ARISE, SLATE, ADIEU. These cover four or five of the most frequent letters in English five-letter words. A bad opening like FUZZY or QUIRK gives you very little information and wastes a guess.
Strategy after the opening is about extracting information per guess. Each guess should test as many new letters as possible. Repeating letters that are already gray in your previous guess wastes that letter slot. The exception is when you know a letter is in the word and want to confirm its position.
The most useful technique for intermediate players is the "letter elimination guess." If you have used three guesses and still cannot pin down the answer, sometimes the right move is to use a guess on a word that contains five letters you have not yet tested, even if you suspect that word is not the answer. This sacrifices a guess but eliminates many possibilities at once. After this kind of probe, you usually have enough information to deduce the answer.
A common mistake is to fixate on a word you think is the answer and keep guessing variants of it. If your first guess was STARE and the second was SHARE, you have only added one new letter. The third guess should branch out, not refine. Letters first, words second.
Position-of-letter logic is the hardest part. A yellow letter in your guess means the letter is in the word but not in that position. So your next guess for that letter must be in a different position. It also cannot be in any position that has already been ruled out. Tracking this in your head gets harder with each guess, especially when multiple letters are yellow.
When you have the right letters but cannot figure out the order, the trick is to think about common letter patterns. Five-letter English words have predictable structures. Double letters, common consonant blends like SH or TH, and common endings like ER or ED narrow the order down quickly.
This version uses a curated list of common five-letter words. It does not accept proper nouns or rare archaic words as guesses. Each puzzle is solvable with the information given by the previous guesses, but only if you make logical use of that information.