W

📮Letterbox

Thursday, August 20, 2026

‹ All games

Rules

Guess the daily five-letter British word in six tries. After each guess the tiles colour-code your accuracy:

  • Green — letter is correct and in the right spot.
  • Yellow — letter is in the word, but in a different spot.
  • Grey — letter is not in the word at all.

Every guess must be a real five-letter word in our British dictionary (so COLOUR-style spellings welcome, color-style won't pass).

Standard mode: any valid 5-letter word as a guess.

Hard mode: every guess must use all your green letters (in their revealed positions) and all your yellow letters (somewhere). No wasting hints.

How to play, with a worked example

The goal

Deduce the target word with as few guesses as possible. Each guess gives you information: which letters are right, which are right-but-misplaced, and which aren't in the word at all. Six guesses total; if you don't get it, the puzzle ends and the answer is revealed.

How to enter a guess

  • Type on your physical keyboard, or tap letters on the on-screen one.
  • Press Enter (or the green Enter key) to submit a complete row.
  • Press Backspace (or the ← key) to delete the letter before the caret.
  • Fixing a letter: tap any cell in the row you're typing to move the caret (the underlined cell) there, then type to replace just that letter — no need to delete the rest of the word.
  • Only valid five-letter British words are accepted. Wrong spellings, made-up words, and proper nouns get rejected without using a turn.

Worked example

Say the target is PLOUGH. (Hypothetical — six letters here just to illustrate, the real game is exactly five.) After guessing STAGE, you'd see something like:

S T A G E · · · G · G = position 4 is correct (kinda — actually G is somewhere else here).

You'd then use that information — G appears in the word — to constrain your next guess. Repeat until you crack it.

Standard vs. Hard mode

  • Standard. Each guess can be any valid word; you don't have to use the hints you already revealed. Useful when you want to probe new letters.
  • Hard. Every guess must respect what you've already learned: any green letter must stay in its position, and any yellow letter must appear somewhere in the new guess. Forces you to deduce, not probe.

Scoring

  • Your score is the number of guesses you took. Fewer is better.
  • Get it in 1: extraordinary luck. In 2-3: very strong. 4-5: solid. 6: phew.
  • Both modes count toward your daily streak.

Tips

  • Start with a word rich in common letters: RAISE, ARISE, STARE, SLATE are classics.
  • If your first guess scores zero hits, your second should cover a totally different letter set — POUND, MULCH — to maximise information.
  • Watch for British spellings: COLOUR, FAVOUR, TYRES, MOULD. The dictionary is British, so American-only forms aren't valid guesses.
Your games

No finished games on this device yet.

Kept on this device only, like the rest of your stats.

Played by everyone today: 2 · all-time: 105

All games Past gamesHelpSupport