A new word every day
El Word is a free daily word puzzle. There’s one hidden five-letter word each day, the same for everyone, and you have six guesses to find it. Every guess tells you something: which letters are in the word, which are in the right place, and which you can forget. A game takes a few minutes.
There’s nothing to sign up for and nothing to install. Your statistics and streak stay in this browser.
How to play
- Type any real five-letter word, on your keyboard or with the letters on screen, and press Enter.
- Each letter gets a mark. Use them to choose your next guess.
- Find the word within six guesses to keep your streak going.
A word we don’t know, or one that’s too short, is turned away without costing you a guess.
Reading the marks
- Dot, dark blue: the letter is in the word, in this spot.
- Ring, pink: the letter is in the word, but in another spot.
- Dashed outline: the letter isn’t in the word.
Letters can appear more than once. If you play a letter twice and the word has it once, one copy is marked and the other is dashed. The letters on the keyboard keep the best mark they’ve had so far. With high-contrast tiles, under How to play, the dot and ring tiles use only the page’s text and background colors.
When the next word arrives
A new word starts at midnight where you are, by your device’s clock, and the countdown under the board shows how long is left. A game you started before midnight stays yours to finish. Each puzzle has a number, counted from the first El Word on 1 October 2026.
Hard mode
In hard mode, every hint you’ve found must be used in your later guesses. A letter with a dot has to stay in its spot, and a letter with a ring has to be somewhere in the word. If one guess showed a letter twice, you need it twice from then on. A guess that leaves out a hint is turned away, with the hint it missed, and doesn’t count.
Turn it on under How to play before your first guess of the day. It can’t be changed once you’ve started, and your shared result says when it was on.
What the word means
When the game is over, win or lose, El Word shows a short definition of the word. Most come from WordNet, a dictionary of English from Princeton University.
Past puzzles
Missed a day? The El Word archive has every puzzle since the first. Past puzzles don’t change your statistics or streak, so play them in any order.
Keyboard
| A to Z | Type a letter |
|---|---|
| Backspace | Delete the last letter |
| Enter | Play the word |
| Tab | Move between the on-screen keys and buttons |
Questions
Does everyone get the same word?
Yes. Everyone playing on the same date gets the same word, wherever they are. Since the day starts at midnight local time, someone a few time zones ahead may already be on the next one.
Which words can I guess?
Any of about 8,700 five-letter English words, in American or British spelling. The hidden words are common ones, and never plurals ending in s, past tenses ending in ed, proper nouns or words spelled differently in the US and the UK.
How does the streak work?
Your streak is the number of days in a row you’ve solved the word. A day missed, or a day you run out of guesses, starts it again from zero. Your best streak is kept too.
How do I share my result?
After the game, Share copies a short summary: the puzzle number, how many guesses you took and a grid of colored squares, without the letters, so you won’t give the word away. On a phone it opens your share menu instead.
Where are my statistics kept?
Only in this browser: today’s game, your statistics and your settings. Nothing is sent anywhere, and clearing your browser’s site data removes them. Some browsers clear data for sites you haven’t visited in a week, which resets the streak.
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- All puzzles
- El Trivia home