Streak
0
Best
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A hidden five-letter English word and six tries to find it. Every guess comes back coloured: blue where a letter sits in exactly the right spot, gold where it belongs to the word but not there, grey where it does not belong at all. Squeeze the answer out of those clues, keep your streak alive, and go again with a fresh word.
Type any real five-letter English word and press Enter. The row you just played turns into your clue set: a blue tile means that letter is in the answer and in exactly that position, a gold tile means the letter is in the answer but belongs somewhere else, and a grey tile means the letter is not in the answer at all.
Use the on-screen keyboard — it colours itself as you go, so every letter you have already ruled in or out stays visible without you having to scroll back over old rows. Backspace fixes a typo before you commit, and nothing counts against you until you press Enter.
Guesses have to be words the game knows. That is a deliberately wide list of about sixteen thousand five-letter words, far wider than the pool the answers come from, so unusual openers are fine. If a guess is rejected, the row shakes and costs you nothing.
Solve it and your streak goes up and a new word is dealt straight away. Use all six tries without finding it and the answer is revealed and the streak resets to zero — that is the moment to save it to the Hall of Fame if it was a good one. The words are English, whatever language the site is set to.
Spend your first guess on vowels and common consonants rather than on a word you hope is the answer. Openers like STARE, CRANE or SLATE cover five of the most frequent letters in one shot, and the information they hand back is worth far more than a lucky strike. Ten of the twenty-six letters carry most of the weight in English five-letter words, so the faster you sweep through them the smaller the search space gets.
Do not waste your second guess re-using letters you already greyed out. It is a surprisingly easy mistake to make when a nice-looking word comes to mind: check it against the keyboard first, because every dead letter you include is one fewer live letter you learn about that turn.
When you have a gold letter, deliberately place it somewhere new. A gold tile tells you the letter belongs to the word and that this position is wrong — putting it back in the same spot teaches you nothing. With two or three golds in hand it is often worth playing a word that shuffles all of them at once rather than one that locks in a single position.
Watch out for doubled letters, which are where most streaks die. If a letter shows blue in one place and grey in another, that grey does not mean the letter is absent — it means there is no second copy of it. Words like GRASS, LEVEL, HAPPY and SHEEP are exactly the ones that survive five guesses, so when you are down to the last try and stuck, ask yourself which letter might be in there twice.