Daily Five

How to play Daily Five

Daily Five is a word game with one five-letter answer a day, the same word for everybody, and six guesses to find it. Each guess has to be a real five-letter word, and each one comes back coloured to tell you how close you were.

A new word arrives at midnight, wherever you are. There is also a practice mode, for when one a day is not enough.

Reading the colours

Every letter of your guess is marked, and between them the six guesses are enough to corner almost any word.

• Green — that letter is in the answer and in exactly that position.
• Yellow — that letter is in the answer, but somewhere else.
• Grey — that letter is not in the answer at all.

The part people get wrong

Repeated letters are where the colouring surprises people. The marks are counted against the letters actually in the answer, so if the answer has one E and you guess a word with two, only one of your Es is coloured — the other comes back grey even though E is clearly in the word.

That grey is information rather than a contradiction: it is telling you there is exactly one E, not none.

Opening well

Your first guess is the only one you make with no information, so it is worth choosing once and reusing.

• Spend it on vowels and common consonants. Words like CRANE, SLATE and ROAST cover a lot of ground.
• Do not repeat a letter in the opening word. A repeat wastes one of only five slots on a letter you are already testing.
• Use the second guess to cover what the first did not rather than chasing a hunch, unless the first guess came back unusually green.
• Keep the greys in mind. Most lost games end with someone guessing a word containing a letter they had already ruled out.

Streaks and sharing

Finishing the daily extends your streak, which resets if you miss a day or fail to get the word. Your streak and results are stored in your own browser rather than on a server, so they belong to that device.

The share button copies a grid of coloured squares — your pattern of guesses with no letters in it, so it gives nothing away to anyone who has not played yet.

Practice mode

Practice rounds draw a random word from the same list and work exactly like the daily, but they do not count towards your streak and do not affect the day's word. Use them to try out an opening word, or simply to keep playing.

Common questions

Is everyone playing the same word?

Yes. The day's answer is worked out from the date itself, so every player's browser arrives at the same word without anything being fetched from a server.

When does the new word arrive?

At midnight in your own time zone, so it lands when your day starts rather than at some hour set elsewhere.

Can I look the answer up in the page source?

Not by reading it — the answer list is scrambled in the code so you cannot skim it by accident. Anyone determined enough will manage, but it will not happen to you by mistake.

Why was my guess rejected?

It has to be five letters and in the dictionary of allowed guesses. That list is much larger than the list of possible answers, so plenty of obscure words are accepted as guesses without ever being the answer.