Game Rules

This section explains the rules and terminology for playing Wordle with this solver.

Terminology

Core Concepts:

  • Word: A 5-letter word in the game’s dictionary

  • Guess: A player’s attempt to guess the word

  • Hidden Word: An unrevealed 5-letter word in the game’s dictionary that the player is attempting to identify

  • Position: The index of a letter in the word, starting from 1 and ending at 5 (1-based indexing)

Word Validation:

  • Valid Word: A word that is in the game’s dictionary and contains only letters from A to Z

Feedback Colors:

  • Green Letter (G): A letter in the guess that is in the same position in the hidden word

  • Yellow Letter (Y): A letter in the guess that exists in the hidden word but in a different position

  • Black Letter (B): A letter in the guess that is not in the hidden word at all, OR a further instance of a letter in the guess which is a higher instance number than the count of that letter in the hidden word

Game Features:

  • Feedback: The response given after a guess, indicating which letters are correct and their positions. The feedback is always a list of 5 elements from the set {‘B’, ‘Y’, ‘G’} corresponding to the letters in the guess

  • Hint: A clue provided to the player, which can be a letter or a position in the word

  • Suggestion: A word or words that is suggested to the player based on their guesses and feedback

Winning Conditions

The game is won when the player guesses the hidden word correctly, receiving feedback of [G, G, G, G, G] for all letters.

Note

Letter case is not important - ‘A’ and ‘a’ are considered the same letter.

Losing Conditions

The game is lost when the player exhausts all 6 attempts without correctly guessing the hidden word.

Error Conditions

Invalid Guesses:

If the guess does not meet the following criteria, it is considered invalid:

  • Must contain exactly 5 letters

  • Must contain only characters from A-Z (case insensitive)

  • Must be a valid word in the game’s dictionary

Important

Invalid guesses do not consume attempts. The player will be prompted to try again with a valid word.

Feedback System

After each valid guess, the system provides feedback using a color-coding system:

Example guess: CRANE
Hidden word:   SLATE

C → B (Black)  - C is not in SLATE
R → B (Black)  - R is not in SLATE
A → Y (Yellow) - A is in SLATE but wrong position
N → B (Black)  - N is not in SLATE
E → G (Green)  - E is in SLATE and correct position

Letter Frequency Rules

When a letter appears multiple times in a guess:

  1. Exact matches (green) are prioritized first

  2. Partial matches (yellow) are assigned up to the remaining count of that letter in the hidden word

  3. Excess instances are marked as black

Example:
Guess:       SPEED
Hidden word: ERASE

S → B (Black)  - S not in ERASE
P → B (Black)  - P not in ERASE
E → G (Green)  - First E matches position 3
E → Y (Yellow) - Second E exists in ERASE (position 1)
D → B (Black)  - D not in ERASE