Memordle Game

Each day there is one five-letter word to find, the same for everyone, and you have six guesses. After each guess, every letter is marked: in the right place, in the word somewhere else, or not in it at all. The twist is that the colours only show for three seconds before they fade, so the game is as much about holding what you learned in your head as about words. The memory techniques on this site help you keep it.

How to play

1. Type a five-letter word and press Enter.
2. A letter in the right spot sits in a large blot of colour, a letter that is in the word but in the wrong spot sits on a small round drop, and a letter that is not in the word is left bare. A key under the board shows which is which.
3. The colours show for three seconds, then fade. Your letters stay as outlines, so you can see what you typed but not what it told you.
4. You have two peeks a word. A peek brings every colour back for two seconds. Press Space or PEEK.
5. A word the game does not know is turned away with a short message, and it costs you no guess.
6. Find the word within six guesses. Then share your result. It shows how you did, never the word.
7. Want more? Play another word, next to Share, deals a random word right away, as many as you like. You never get the same word twice until you have had them all.

Choose a level on the start screen. Easy fades the board but keeps the colours on the keyboard. Normal, the default, keeps the keyboard blank. Hard fades your letters too, and leaves only the short line under each place. On a keyboard, type the word, press Enter to guess, Backspace to correct and Space to peek. Escape pauses.

Scoring

A word found on the first guess scores 600 points, on the second 500, and so on down to 100 on the sixth. A word not found scores nothing. Each level keeps its own high scores for the daily word, and its own for the extra words.

• The day's word changes at midnight where you are. Its number, such as No. 12, counts the days since the first Memordle.
• Your streak counts the days in a row you found the word. A day missed or a word not found starts it again.
• The extra words from Play another word never touch your streak or your daily result. Turn on Rarer words to get less common words among them, with high scores of their own. The daily word is always a common one.

Your results, your streak and your best scores are saved in this browser only.

Where the words come from

The answers are common English words that are dictionary headwords, so never a plural or a past tense, picked with the help of the SCOWL word lists and Open English WordNet. The rarer words follow the same rules, from SCOWL's larger lists. Any real five-letter word from a much larger list is taken as a guess. See our credits.

To get better at holding things in mind, read How to Use the Method of Loci and How to Create Mnemonic Images. Or try our other free memory games.