Inkling

How to play

There is a hidden five-letter word, and you have six tries to find it. Type any five-letter word and press Enter. Every letter you play comes back with a clue about where it belongs, and the next guess is yours to build from what you learned.

Everyone gets the same word each day. Your progress is saved in this browser as you go, so you can close the tab and come back to a half-finished board.

What the colours mean

Green means the letter is in the word and you have it in the right place. Yellow means the letter is in the word but somewhere else. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all.

Repeated letters follow the clues you have already been given. If the answer holds one E and you guess a word with two, only one of them lights up — the clues account for the letters in the answer rather than simply saying whether a letter appears.

If green and yellow are hard to tell apart, open Optionsabove the keyboard and turn on high contrast. The tiles switch to orange and blue, which differ in brightness as well as hue, and the shared result grid switches with them.

Daily word or unlimited practice

This page holds the daily: one word, shared by everyone, and it counts towards your streak and your guess distribution. If one puzzle a day is not enough, practice mode deals a fresh word every time and leaves your statistics alone.

Tips for a better first guess

Open with a word rich in vowels and common consonants —arose, slate and audio all rule out a great deal in one move. A strong second guess avoids reusing letters you have already greyed out, since a guess that repeats known-dead letters buys you almost nothing.

When you are down to one unknown position with several candidates, it is often worth spending a guess on a word that tests several of them at once, even if that word cannot be the answer. You have six tries, and information is what wins.