Secret Word: how to pick your first word and solve in fewer guesses

Six guesses for a five-letter word sounds tight, but it is plenty if the first two are spent gathering information rather than guessing. This guide works from the real numbers of the English dictionary in Pocket Games: which letters actually turn up, which openers leave the fewest doubts, and where the traps are.

How it works, briefly

Secret Word is the word game made famous by Wordle: there is a hidden five-letter word and you have six guesses to find it. Every guess has to be a real word; once you submit it, each letter changes colour to tell you how close you are.

On Pocket Games there is no word of the day: every game draws a new one, so you can play as often as you like. The English dictionary has two lists. The answers are 2,300 common words; about 15,900 words are accepted as guesses, rarer ones included. A word that is not in the dictionary is flagged and does not cost you the guess.

Every number in this guide is computed on those 2,300 answers, that is, on the words that can actually come up. One thing worth knowing straight away: the answer list includes plurals and verb forms, such as RATES, TEARS or ROLES. That changes a lot, as you will see.

What the colours really say

• Green: the letter is in the word, in the right place.
• Yellow: the letter is in the word, but not in that position.
• Grey: the letter is not in the word, or there are no more copies of it.

That last clause is the one almost everybody ignores. When a letter appears twice in your guess, the game colours the exact matches first, then hands out yellows from left to right only while the answer still has unused copies of that letter. The rest turn grey.

Two examples with the same guess, SHEEP. If the answer is THREE:

Both Es are coloured: the answer has at least two, one in fourth position and one somewhere other than third. If instead the answer is CHEST:

Now the second E is grey even though the word has an E: it means there is only one E, the green one. A grey next to a green or yellow of the same letter does not mean “letter missing”, it means “no second copy”.

The keyboard under the grid keeps the best colour each letter has had during the game (green, then yellow, then grey): a grey key is a letter you have never seen coloured, and it is safe to avoid.

The letters that matter in English

This is the share of the 2,300 answers that contain each letter at least once:

Next come M, Y, G, B and K between 11% and 13%, and at the bottom J, X, Z and Q at about 1% each. Three facts that change how you play:

• S is almost as common as E. Because plurals and third-person verbs are valid answers, 26% of words end in S. Among final letters, S is far ahead: next come E (13%), Y (9%), then T, D and R.
• English is short on vowels. 35% of answers have only one vowel among A, E, I, O, U, 58% have two, and just 7% have three or more. A handful have none at all: CRYPT, GYPSY, LYNCH, MYTHS and PSYCH, where Y does the job.
• One word in three repeats a letter. 32% of answers contain a letter twice, most often E, S or O. Adjacent doubles are less common (15%) and are mostly OO, EE and LL, as in BLOOD, GREEN or SKILL.

The first word

The first word is not for guessing: it is for splitting the 2,300 possibilities into as many small groups as possible. The honest way to measure an opener is to ask: after playing it, how many answers are still consistent with the colours, on average? Here is the count for a few openers, computed over all 2,300 answers:

The best openers share a recipe: two vowels, R, S and T, and no repeated letters. The S matters more than usual here because of the plurals: RATES leaves 52 words on average out of 2,300, and CRANE, a good opener elsewhere, leaves 86 because it has no S. The famous vowel-heavy openers do worst. ADIEU and AUDIO tell you which vowels are in the word, but since nearly every word has one or two, that barely narrows the field, while an R or an S splits words into very different groups.

You do not need to memorise a perfect word: pick one from the top half of the table and always use it, so you learn to read its results at a glance.

The second word: five new letters

This is the guess people waste most often. After the first word you have a few yellows, and the temptation is to try a plausible word that uses them all straight away. If the first guess left plenty of possibilities, do the opposite: play five letters you have not tried, ignoring the ones you have already found.

After RATES, for example, COULD or CLOUD covers five more common letters. With the pair RATES + COULD, about five answers remain on average; in one game out of four only one is left, and in about half the games there are three or fewer. At that point the third guess is often the winning one. BLOND and CLING work almost as well.

A real game, with PROUD as the answer:

After RATES there are 75 words left: BIRCH, BRICK, BROWN, CHORD, COLOR…

After COULD only one is left: PROUD.

The rule has an exception: if the first word already gave you three or four coloured letters, the options are few and you should move straight to a candidate word. Whether to play “to explore” or “to win” is decided by counting: if the candidates outnumber your remaining guesses, explore.

From the third guess: watch out for families

The real danger comes when many near-identical words remain. English is full of them: there are eight answers ending in -IGHT (EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT), eight in -OUND, seven in -ATCH and seven in -ILLS.

With MATCH as the answer, RATES gives a green A and a green T in second and third place, and COULD adds only a yellow C. Five words fit: BATCH, HATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH. With four guesses left, trying them one at a time loses whenever the answer is the last one you pick.

The right move is a word that cannot be the answer but splits the group. BUMPY contains B, M and P, three of the letters that tell these words apart: after BUMPY you either know the answer or are down to HATCH or WATCH, and the win is guaranteed by the fifth guess. Giving up a “good” guess for an “informative” one is what separates players who always finish from those who sometimes lose on the sixth.

Plurals and endings

Because plurals are allowed, the fifth square deserves attention of its own. A green S at the end after the first guess makes a plural or a verb form very likely, and the word becomes a four-letter problem: look for the stem. If the S of your opener comes back grey, you have ruled out nearly half the answers in one go: 45% of them contain an S.

The other common endings are -ES (6% of answers), -ER and -ED. Once the last letter is fixed, it is often worth checking the second-to-last: E before a final S, D or R is very common.

The most common mistakes

• Putting a yellow back in the same place. A yellow says two things: the letter is in the word, and it is not there. Moving it is compulsory; moving it as far as possible gives the most information.
• Reusing grey letters. In an exploratory guess every grey letter is a wasted square. Check the keyboard before you submit.
• Reading grey as “missing” when there is a double. If the same letter is green or yellow elsewhere in the guess, the grey only means “there is no other one”.
• Opening with four vowels. It feels clever, but AUDIO leaves four times as many words as RATES.
• Forgetting plurals. A quarter of the answers end in S. If nothing else fits, try the plural.
• Chasing a plausible word too early. On the second guess, five new letters are almost always worth more than a word that “might be it”.

In practice

Always open with the same word, for example RATES. If it leaves plenty of options, play five new letters such as COULD. From the third guess, count the candidates: if there are more than the guesses you have left, play a word that splits them; if there are fewer, try them. Keep repeated letters and plurals in mind.

The game’s record is the fewest guesses you have solved a word in: with this method, three becomes normal. The full rules and the common questions are on the Secret Word page, and you can play straight away in your browser. More guides are on the guides page.