Wordle’s biggest draw is its simplicity: Anybody can look at five blank spaces and think of a five-letter word. But when it comes to playing Wordle well, and enjoying the game over time, you might do better with a few tips. I have a nearly 100% win rate in Wordle—more about win rates below—so here are some of mine.
Never guess letters you already know
If I could only give one strategy tip, it would be this: Your first guess, and even your second and third, shouldn’t be attempts to solve the puzzle. Instead, you should be gathering information about possible solutions.
This means that if you guessed a word ending in “ER” and those letters turned green, you should not try another word ending in ER as your next guess. If you guess a completely different five-letter word, say BENCH, you can find out whether B, N, C, and H are in the solution, while also getting information about whether there’s an E in the second position (which helps you know whether words like LEVER and METER might be in play).
There is a toggle in the game interface that requires every word to use green squares from your previous guesses. It’s called “hard mode.” If you ask me, this should be called “luck mode,” because it takes away one of the game’s best strategies for smart solvers, as guessing letters you already know is just wasting guesses.
I wrote more about this strategy here, and included more examples. Use this tip, and you’ll avoid the trap of losing after guessing FOUND, ROUND, POUND, MOUND, SOUND, and WOUND when you could have used MARSH as your second guess and instantly figured out the answer (HOUND).
Choose a starter with common consonants
There are competing schools of thought on choosing the best starting word for Wordle, an issue I have considered in depth. But to summarize the best advice: Choose a word with five different letters (no repeats) that includes at least two or three of the English language’s most common consonants.
Those most common consonants include T, N, S, H, R, D, L, and C. That means TRASH is a great starter, and so are CRANE and STEAL and STARE. For best results, use E and/or A as your vowels, since these are some of the most common vowels in English.
Play two starters to give you a one-two punch
A starting word needs to give you information about what might be in the solution, but you don’t gain a ton of information with just five letters. So I recommend having another starting word that doesn’t overlap with the first, but expands the amount of information you can collect to 10 total data points.
After all these years, my trusty pair is still ARISE and TOUCH. That gives me all five vowels and a good sampling of the most common consonants, as discussed above. (Only N is notably missing, but I can always play that in a later guess.)
Feel free to come up with your own pair, where the second guess fills in gaps left by the first. If you like to start with a vowel-heavy word like ADIEU, use more consonants in your second move: perhaps THORN. Or if you start with TRASH, perhaps follow it with OUNCE.
Play more perfect games to get your win rate back to 100%
I pride myself on my 100% Wordle win rate, but the truth is, I’m actually at 99% right now. The NYT’s “About Wordle” page says that “Win % counts the percentage of total puzzles played that you have won,” but that doesn’t seem to be entirely correct. It also does not say how the app handles rounding. I believe I’ve lost three times over the 1,368 games I’ve played, which is actually a 99.8% win rate. But after every loss, the count has eventually gotten back up to 100%.
What I’ve figured out is this: As soon as you lose a game, your 100% win rate drops to 99%.But if you win (I am pretty sure!) another 200 in a row, you can earn that last percentage point back. I haven’t kept a perfect count since my last loss, but I’m pretty sure I’ve played more than 100. And despite losing a few games over the years, I’ve usually managed to keep a 100% win score.
Remember that past solutions are once again fair game
For its first few years, Wordle never repeated a solution. If you could remember ever seeing a certain word as a solution, it was guaranteed not to be that day’s answer. But that changed in February of 2026, when the New York Times officially announced that previous solutions may be reused.