Word Quest

Six guesses, five letters, unlimited rounds.

How to play

Guess the hidden five-letter word in six tries.
Type a guess and press Enter. It has to be a real word — the game will not accept letter soup.
A green tile means the letter is correct and in the right place.
An amber tile means the letter is in the word but somewhere else.
A grey tile means the letter is not in the word at all.
Solve it or run out, then press Play again for a brand new word. There is no daily limit.

Openers that actually help

The first guess is not for winning, it is for information. That makes the best openers the ones with five different common letters and no repeats — words like CRANE, SLATE, RAISE or ADIEU. A repeated letter wastes one of your five test slots, and J, Q, X and Z come back grey so often that they tell you almost nothing.

The middle game

Once you have two or three greens, the instinct is to lock them in and guess a word that could win. Often that is wrong. If four candidates differ only in one position, a guess that tests several of those letters at once — even one that cannot possibly be the answer — turns a one-in-four gamble into a certainty on the next turn. Spend a guess to buy information when you have guesses to spare.

Watch the endings

When several candidates survive, they usually differ at the end rather than the start. English has far more variety in word endings than in beginnings, so a guess that discriminates between -ER, -LY, -ED and -CH earns more than one testing another first letter. Our five-letter word lists are grouped by exactly that if you want to see the distribution.

Common questions

How many times can I play?

As often as you want. Every round draws a new answer, which is the whole reason this game exists alongside the daily one.

Where do the answers come from?

A pool of 2,200 common five-letter words, chosen by how often they appear in written English and filtered to drop plurals. Guesses are checked against a much larger dictionary, so you can type any real word even when it would never be the answer.

Why was my guess rejected?

It is not in the dictionary the game checks against — usually a proper noun, an abbreviation, or a spelling variant. Everything valid in our Word Finder is accepted here too.

Are plurals ever the answer?

No. Words ending in S are excluded from the answer pool, because guessing whether the answer is BOARD or BOARDS is a coin flip rather than a deduction. You can still guess them.

Is my streak saved?

In your browser only, on this device. There is no account, so clearing site data or switching browsers starts you over. Nothing about your play is sent anywhere.

Can I get help when I am stuck?

Yes — the solver takes the tiles you have and shows every word still possible. It is the same feedback system, so it works on this game exactly as it works on any other.

More games

All free, all in the browser, none of them ask who you are.

All games