Five Letters tips and strategy

By P Sai Kalyan · Updated November 4, 2026

A daily Five Letters puzzle is solved in six guesses or fewer by thinking about what each result rules out, not by lucky guessing. This guide covers the habits that save the most guesses, and finishes with a worked example you can follow letter by letter.

1. Open with common, different letters

Your first guess has no information to work with, so its job is to learn as much as possible. Choose a word with five different letters that appear often in English words, for example CRANE, SLATE or STARE. Avoid openers with a repeated letter: the second copy tells you almost nothing new.

2. Use guess two to test new letters

If the first guess leaves you with a few greens, it is tempting to fill in the gaps straight away. Often a better second guess brings in five letters you have not tried yet, even if the word could not be the answer. Two guesses that share no letters check ten different letters between them, and that usually narrows the field far more than guessing a word that only changes one letter.

3. Read yellow letters as position clues

A yellow letter tells you two things: the letter is in the word, and it is not in the place you put it. Next time, move it. Players often keep a yellow letter in the same spot out of habit, which wastes a guess.

4. Understand repeated letters

If a letter appears twice in your guess but only once in the answer, only one of the two copies can be coloured. The one in the correct place is marked green first. If neither is in the right place, the first copy is yellow and the second grey. A grey copy of a letter that is also green or yellow elsewhere therefore means "no more of this letter", not "this letter is absent". Remember it when you suspect a double letter, as in words like LLAMA or SHEEP.

5. Watch out for look-alike words

The most common way to lose a game is to find a pattern such as _IGHT and then guess its members one at a time: LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT. With three guesses left that can run out before you hit the right one. Instead, spend one guess on a word that is not a candidate but contains several of the missing first letters. It splits the group so the next guess can be the answer.

6. Keep track of what you have ruled out

Before each guess, say to yourself which letters are green, which are yellow (and where they cannot go), and which are grey. The on-screen keyboard shows the grey letters, so you can also check that your new word does not reuse them by accident.

A worked example

Suppose the hidden word is MATCH.

Guess 1: CRANE. C and A turn yellow (both are in the word, but not in those places); R, N and E are grey.
Guess 2: TOUCH. T is yellow, O and U are grey, and C and H are green. The word now ends in CH and contains an A and a T.
Why not just guess? Our dictionary still has five words that fit: BATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH and WATCH. Guessing them one by one could take five more guesses.
Guess 3: BLIMP. It cannot be the answer, but it contains B, L, M and P. Here only the M turns yellow, which can only mean MATCH. (If every letter had been grey, the answer would have been WATCH.)
Guess 4: MATCH. Solved in four.

The probe word looks like a wasted guess, but it turned a five-way gamble into a certainty.

Practise every day

You can play one Five Letters puzzle a day on DailyClue, and the puzzle changes at midnight India Standard Time. For the rules, see how to play. If you enjoy deduction, try CodeBreak and its strategy guide, or the Word Ladder and its tips.