In Daily Word you get one more guess than the word has letters. That is enough to get there by trial and error, but not enough to waste guesses. Here are a few tips based directly on the list of answers in the game. In October 2026 the English list holds about 590 common nouns of five to seven letters.
A first word for each length
The daily word has a different length every day, so no single starting word works for all of them. For each length we counted how many answers contain each letter. Then, for common words from the list, we added up those shares over all their different letters. The result tells you how many letters such a word shares with the answer on average.
| Length | Good first words | Letters shared on average |
|---|---|---|
| 5 letters | heart, canoe, ocean, crane | about 1.8 |
| 6 letters | pirate, orange, waiter, carpet | 2.4 to 2.5 |
| 7 letters | painter, sardine, cashier, panther | 2.9 to 3.2 |
These words contain the letters that are most common in the answers: e, a, r, o, t, i and n. Every letter in them is different, so no tile is wasted on a repeat. If more words are added to the game over time, the order may shift a little, but the letters will stay much the same.
E, A and R
The letter e appears in 58 percent of the answers, a and r in 48 percent each. If your first guess shows no e at all, you have learned a lot: more than half of the possible words are out.
Endings help too. Eighteen percent of the answers end in e and seventeen percent in r, often as part of -er, as in painter, waiter or teacher. When a six- or seven-letter word shows a yellow e and a yellow r, try them at the end.
Do not rule out double letters
Almost half of the answers, 48 percent, have a letter that appears more than once, as in apple, balloon or teacher. When you have confirmed a letter and are not sure where else to look, try putting it in twice.
It helps to know how the game marks repeated letters. A letter is shown as found at most as many times as it appears in the answer. If you type two o’s and only one is marked, the word has only one o.
Second guess: new letters or a safe bet
After your first guess you have two options. You can try a word that fits everything you know so far, or a word made of completely new letters. The second option sounds wasteful, but it often pays off.
If your first word marked one letter or none, try a second word that shares no letters with the first. With five letters, that tests ten different letters in two guesses. If your first word marked three or more letters, go straight for a word that uses all of them.
Daily Word has no hard mode that forces you to reuse found letters. A guess can be any word in the dictionary, in any form.
An example game
Today’s word has six letters and your first guess is pirate. The result: i is faded, r is dark, and p, a, t and e are yellow. So r is in third place, and the word contains p, a, t and e, but p is not first, a is not fourth, t is not fifth and e is not sixth.
Six letters with r in the middle and e not at the end: maybe the e comes just before the end, followed by t. That gives you something like _ a r p e t. Carpet fits every clue, and all the tiles turn dark. Solved on the second guess.
It will not always be that quick. The method stays the same, though: cross out letters that are ruled out, move yellow letters to spots where they have not been yet, and look for a word that fits all of it.
When you are stuck
- Go through the on-screen keyboard and check which letters are not crossed out yet.
- Write the word on paper and try vowels in the empty spots.
- Think of everyday things from home, school and the garden. The answers are common nouns, chosen so that children know them too.
- Do not be afraid of a word the dictionary might not know. A guess like that does not count and costs nothing.
Practice words for training
If you want to try a strategy without risk, switch to Practice mode. You get a random word of five to seven letters that does not count in the statistics. Try different first words there and see which one suits you.
The full rules are in Daily Word rules in detail.