Sanuli Wordle: Finland’s Finnish Word Game Explained

Sanuli is the Finnish answer to Wordle: a daily five-letter word-guessing game at sanuli.fi where you uncover a hidden Finnish word within six attempts. It uses the same green, yellow and grey tile feedback as the original, but with Finnish vocabulary, Finnish word lists, and difficulty settings you can adjust yourself.

What Is Sanuli?

When Wordle took over the world in early 2022, cloners everywhere started building local-language versions. In Finland, the standout clone was Sanuli (sanuli.fi) — a word game, a clone of Wordle, but with Finnish words. It became the go-to daily puzzle for Finnish speakers, Finnish learners and anyone who wanted their morning word game in Finnish rather than English.

The name says it all: "sana" is Finnish for "word", and Sanuli is simply the Wordle formula rebuilt on Finnish vocabulary. If you know how to play Wordle, you already know how to play Sanuli — the only new challenge is Finnish spelling.

Sanuli is an unofficial fan project with no affiliation to the New York Times or the original Wordle.

How to Play Sanuli

The core gameplay will feel instantly familiar:

Step 1: Open the daily game

Visit sanuli.fi in your browser. A new hidden word is available every day.

Step 2: Type a five-letter word

Enter any valid five-letter Finnish word as your first guess and press Enter. The game checks your guess against its dictionary, so made-up words will be rejected with an alert.

Step 3: Read the colour feedback

After each guess, the tiles change colour to show how close you were:

• Green — the letter is correct and in the right position.
• Yellow — the letter is in the word but in the wrong position.
• Grey — the letter is not in the word at all.

Step 4: Solve it in six tries

Use the feedback to narrow down the possibilities. You have six attempts to find the hidden word, exactly like Wordle.

Step 5: Share your result

Once you solve it (or run out of tries), you can share your score grid with friends — the same little coloured-tile squares that made Wordle famous.

The Finnish Word Lists

This is where Sanuli genuinely differs from the original. Sanuli's entire word database is built from a modern Finnish word list published by the Center for Domestic Languages (Kotus), released under a Creative Commons-style licence ("CC Nimää 3.0 Mookaamaton"). In practice, that means the game draws on basically all Finnish words still in use today, including compound words in their basic form — and Finnish loves its compound words.

Even better, Sanuli lets you choose the difficulty of the word list in the settings:

• Easy list — common everyday words, suitable for all ages and Finnish learners.
• Standard list — common words from the full list.
• Hard list — a wider range including colloquialisms and dialect words.

You can also switch between five-letter and six-letter words, which keeps the game fresh much longer. The original Wordle never offered that kind of control.

Sanuli vs Wordle vs Wordle Suomi

Note: there are also generic portal pages that describe "Wordle in Finnish" or "Wordle Suomi". Those are usually unofficial mirrors; the named, purpose-built Finnish game is Sanuli at sanuli.fi, the definitive suomi wordle. (We also cover the broader "Wordle Suomi" keyword separately — see our related article.)

7 Tips to Get Better at Sanuli

1. Learn the common Finnish letters. Finnish words use vowels heavily — A, E, I, O, U plus Ä and Ö. Openers that test several vowels pay off fast.
2. Use the Ä and Ö early. These are among the most common letters in Finnish and almost never appear in English openers, so remember to test them.
3. Start on Easy. If you are learning Finnish, the Easy word list with everyday vocabulary is the right warm-up before Standard or Hard.
4. Think in compounds. Finnish builds long compound words; on six-letter mode, think of common compound halves.
5. Respect double letters. Finnish uses doubled consonants and vowels constantly (think sauna, kello). Do not be afraid to double a letter that went yellow.
6. Use process of elimination. Grey letters are just as informative as greens — with only six tries, every elimination counts.
7. Try six-letter mode for a challenge. Once five-letter Sanuli feels easy, the six-letter setting stretches the same deduction skills further.

Where to Play Sanuli Free

The original game is free at sanuli.fi. It runs in any modern browser on desktop or mobile, with no sign-up required. Several portal sites (such as rankdle.io, wordgames.gg and dordle.io) also host Sanuli pages, but sanuli.fi is the dedicated home of the game — and the only place guaranteed to carry the official daily Finnish word puzzle. Enjoying language-based daily puzzles? Learn how to play Plusword for another daily word challenge, or see how the originals compare in Plusword vs Wordle.

Is Sanuli Official?

No. Sanuli is a fan-made clone inspired by Wordle, with no affiliation to the New York Times. It is, however, a well-established one: developers have even built open-source Sanuli solvers (such as the sanuli-konuli project on GitHub) and written technical breakdowns of its mechanics, which is usually a sign a game has a real, active player base. As the Finnish answer to Wordle, it remains the best-known Finnish-language daily word puzzle, and its adjustable difficulty settings keep it welcoming for learners as well as fluent speakers.

Sanuli's Difficulty Levels and Modes Explained

Sanuli is really several games in one, and picking the right configuration matters more than raw guessing skill. The three word-list tiers — Easy (Helppo), Standard and Hard — draw from progressively rarer slices of the Kotus modern-Finnish word list: Easy sticks to everyday vocabulary, while Hard reaches for words even native speakers meet infrequently. New players should live on Easy with five letters until wins feel routine; jumping to Hard early teaches you nothing except frustration. The letter-count switch (five vs six letters) is the second dial: six-letter Sanuli is a meaningfully harder deduction puzzle, not just a longer one, because the extra slot multiplies the possibility space. Then there is Neluli, the four-words-at-once mode for Quordle-style multitaskers — shared guesses across four Finnish words, and the ultimate test of whether your vowel-harmony instincts have become automatic. A sensible progression: Easy five-letter daily, then Standard, then six-letter, then Neluli. Each step reuses the same core skills — harmony awareness, double-letter instincts, Kotus vocabulary — at a higher intensity.