Word500

WORD500: FIVE LETTERS, THREE COUNTS, EIGHT GUESSES

Word500 challenges you to uncover a hidden five-letter word in eight guesses. The twist comes after each attempt: you learn how many letters are correct, misplaced, or absent, but the game never identifies them individually. Every guess leaves you with clues to interpret and possibilities to narrow down.

HOW TO PLAY

Enter a valid five-letter word, submit your guess, and read the three colored counts beside the row:

• Green: Letters that match the answer in the correct position.
• Yellow: Letters that belong in the answer but occupy the wrong position.
• Red: Letters that do not match the answer.

Compare these totals across your guesses to work out which letters belong in the secret word and where they fit. You win by finding the answer within eight attempts.

Knowing several suitable words helps, but each candidate must also agree with the feedback from earlier guesses.

A Simple Clue Example

Suppose the secret word is PLANT and you guess TRAIN. The feedback would be 1 green, 2 yellow, and 2 red.

The A is correctly positioned. T and N appear in the answer elsewhere, while R and I are absent. During an actual puzzle, however, you only see the totals 1–2–2. Discovering which letters produced those numbers is your job.

CHOOSE YOUR WORD500 CHALLENGE

Three Difficulty Levels

Standard provides a starting point: secret words contain no repeated letters, and English answers exclude J, Q, X, and Z.

Standard+ keeps the restriction on repeated letters while allowing the full alphabet.

Advanced allows repeated letters, introducing more possibilities to consider. These difficulty restrictions describe the secret word, so keep them in mind when evaluating potential answers.

Daily, Practice, and Archive

Choose Daily for the day’s puzzle, Practice for unlimited additional games, or Archive to revisit earlier daily challenges. Practice is useful for getting comfortable with the count-based feedback before tackling your next Daily puzzle.

TOOLS THAT HELP YOU THINK

Word500 includes several tools for organizing your deductions:

• Manual color marking: Click letter tiles to cycle through red, yellow, green, and no color.
• Clear: Remove your color markings when you want to reconsider a theory.
• Underscore placeholder: Press Space or hyphen to leave a temporary gap while planning a word.
• Hint: After at least one guess, generate a word consistent with previous clues.

Your manually assigned colors are notes, so review them whenever new evidence challenges an earlier assumption. A hint offers a compatible guess rather than necessarily revealing the answer.

MORE WORD PUZZLES TO TRY

Try Foodle to uncover five-letter words related to food and the kitchen using colored letter clues. For a different challenge, explore Contexto, where numerical rankings guide you toward a hidden word through meaning rather than spelling.