Guess the word

How to play

Type a 5-letter Italian word and press Enter. Colors guide you: green is in the right spot, yellow is in the word but elsewhere, gray is not there. You have 6 tries.

Tip

Start with vowel-rich words to reveal many letters fast. Note: the words are Italian. Each game picks a random word.

The first word is worth more than all the others

The point is not to guess: it is to eliminate. A good opening contains frequent letters, all different, so that every square yields information. In Italian the commonest letters are A, E, I, O, R, N, T, L, S, C, and a word combining five different ones narrows the field far more than a lucky attempt.

The recommended openings are those mixing frequent vowels and consonants, and it is worth having two prepared: if the first yields almost nothing, the second covers another five letters. Wasting the second word on a variation of the first is the mistake that lengthens every game.

Yellow says two things, not one

A yellow letter says the letter is there and that it is not in that place, and the second part is what almost everyone forgets: the square where it appeared is ruled out. Trying the same letter in the same position again is the commonest way to throw away a guess.

Then watch out for double letters, where the colour logic becomes subtle: if a letter appears twice in the guess and once in the answer, one square will be coloured and the other grey. A grey in that case does not mean «this letter is absent», it means «there is not another one». It is the trap that loses games already won.

When it pays to play an impossible word

If four candidates remain that differ only in the first letter, trying them one at a time can cost four guesses. Playing instead a word that cannot be the answer but contains those four letters settles everything in one go, and leaves one to write the answer.

It only makes sense when the remaining guesses outnumber the possibilities to be distinguished, but it is the move that separates people playing on instinct from people playing on information. In hard modes this strategy is banned on purpose, because it is too strong.

Why it is a different game in Italian

Italian has few final consonants and a great many words ending in a vowel, which makes the last square less informative than in English. In exchange it has many doubled letters and many words differing by a single letter, and that makes endings with three or four remaining candidates frequent.

There is then the question of verb forms: if they are allowed, the space of solutions widens enormously and certain deductions collapse. It is the first thing to settle when two people play on a shared grid, along with whether accents and proper nouns are in.

Nearby tools

For other word challenges there are Anagram generator and Word search maker. For logic Minesweeper and Connect 4, and for a group evening General knowledge quiz.