Word Code: guess the word without coloured letters

The secret word has five letters, but here the letters are never coloured. Next to each guess you only get three numbers: how many letters are in the right place, how many are there but misplaced, how many are missing. Which ones they are is for you to work out, by comparing one row with another.

The rules

There is a secret five-letter word and you have ten guesses. Every guess must be a real word. Once you submit it, three small squares to the right of the row each show a number:

• Green: how many letters are right and in the right place.
• Yellow: how many letters are in the word, but in a different position.
• Grey: how many letters are not in the word.

The three numbers always add up to five, and they tell you how many, never which. You win by typing the exact word, that is by getting five greens; if the ten guesses run out first, the game shows you the word.

It is the same kind of clue as the board game with coloured pegs made famous by Mastermind, applied to words: every row is an equation with five unknowns, and you win by putting the equations together.

Double letters

Repeats are counted as in Secret Word: a letter counts at most as many times as it appears in the secret word, and letters in the right place are counted first.

If the secret word is PLANT and you type TASTE, the result is 0 green, 2 yellow, 3 grey. The A is there but misplaced, and so is one of the two Ts; the second T counts as grey, because PLANT has only one T. Together with S and E that makes the three greys.

A game from start to finish

The secret word is PLANT. Here is how you can find it in six guesses, and what each row tells you.

• STARE: two of these five letters are in the word, one in the right place and one misplaced. You do not know which: it could be S and T, A and E, any pair at all.
• STORE is the same word with a single letter changed, the A in third place turned into an O. Green drops from 1 to 0 and grey rises from 3 to 4: so the green from before was the A, in third position, and there is no O. The yellow is still one of S, T, R and E.
• HORDE: zero green and zero yellow. Five letters ruled out in one go, including R and E: so the yellow from the first row is either the S or the T.
• FUMES: zero again. The S is out as well, so the misplaced letter is the T, and it is not in second position. At this point the word has an A in third place and a T somewhere else, and none of the excluded letters. Among the words the game can pick as an answer, four are left: AWAIT, GIANT, PLAIT, PLANT.
• PLAIN cannot be the answer, because it has no T, but it is chosen to split the four: it would give a different result for each of them. Its 3 green, 1 yellow leaves just one possibility.
• PLANT: five greens.

Look at the third and fourth guesses: neither of them could be the answer, and they are the ones that decided the game. After STARE there were 307 possible answers; after STORE 63, after HORDE 19, after FUMES 4.

Colour notes

The game does not tell you which letters are right, so you keep track of them yourself. Tapping a letter in a row you have already submitted changes its colour with every tap: green, yellow, dark grey, and then back to no colour.

• They are only notes: they do not change the numbers and the game does not check whether they are right. If you spot a mistake, tap the letter until it is back to how it was.
• Dark grey also darkens the letter on the keyboard, so you do not reuse it by mistake. The key goes back to normal when you remove the last dark mark for that letter. It is a darker grey than the grey square, so your own note is never confused with a clue from the game.
• The keyboard never colours itself: that would mean telling you which letters are in the word, which is exactly the information the game holds back.

In the example above, after HORDE you mark its five letters dark grey straight away, and the A of STARE green after the second guess. The method that pays off best is to mark only what you are sure you know: a note put down on a hunch and then forgotten leads you further astray than a missing one.

How to reason

• Change one letter at a time when you want to learn something specific. Two rows that differ by a single letter isolate that letter: if green goes up, the new letter is right there; if yellow goes up, it is in the word but elsewhere; if nothing changes, the new and the old letter are worth the same (either both are in the word, or neither is).
• A zero is worth its weight in gold. A row with zero green and zero yellow rules out five letters for certain. From then on those letters are the perfect filler: a word made of excluded letters plus a single letter to test tells you everything about that letter.
• Green plus yellow tells you how many letters you have caught. The sum counts the letters of your guess that really are in the word. Swapping two letters round leaves the sum unchanged and only moves points between green and yellow: that is how you work out where a letter you know is in the word belongs.
• Start wide, finish narrow. The first words are there to find out which letters are in the word: better to use words with no letters in common and with the most frequent letters in English (e, a, r, i, o, t, n, s, l, c). "Plausible" words come later, once the numbers have narrowed the field.
• Your guess does not need to be a possible answer. Like PLAIN in the example, the most useful word is often one that cannot win but splits the remaining possibilities well.

How it differs from Secret Word

Secret Word is the game this one grew out of: same five-letter word, same dictionary, same keyboard. What changes is the kind of information you get, and with it the way you play.

In Secret Word every guess answers letter by letter, and the game is mostly a matter of vocabulary. Here a single row tells you little: the real information comes from comparing two or three rows, and a good player picks words thinking about which comparison they want to make next. That is why you get ten guesses instead of six.

On Pocket Games

• The word changes every game: there is no word of the day, so you can play as often as you like. The dictionary is the one Secret Word uses in the app’s language: in English the answer comes from about 2,900 common words, while about 9,400 are accepted as guesses.
• A word that is not in the dictionary is flagged in red under the grid and does not use up the guess.
• The keyboard has the 26 letters, with backspace on the left and ENTER on the right. On a computer you type on the physical keyboard: letters, Enter and Backspace.
• The game is saved after every guess and every note: from the start screen you pick it up with the Continue button, which shows how many guesses you have already used.
• The record is the fewest guesses you have solved a word in, and it is separate from the Secret Word one. If you are signed in with an account it is synced to your other devices.

Frequently asked questions

Why ten guesses and not six?

Because each guess tells you much less: three numbers instead of five colours. With six guesses the game would come down almost entirely to how lucky your first words were.

Can I enter a made-up word to probe for letters?

No: the guess has to be a word in the dictionary. If it is not, a red warning appears and you can fix it without losing the guess. Probing words like HORDE or PLAIN in the example have to be found among real ones, and that is part of the game.

Do the notes affect my score?

No. You can colour and recolour letters as often as you like without using up guesses, and the game does not tell you whether a note is right or wrong.

Are there hyphens or apostrophes?

No, just plain five-letter words with no punctuation: whatever you can type on the game’s keyboard.

What happens if I change the app’s language mid-game?

The saved game carries on with the dictionary of the language it started in. The next game uses the new language.

More games to try

• Secret Word
• Mathle
• Word Ladder

See the full list of games, or open Pocket Games in your browser: they are free and you don’t need an account.