Wordiply Today Game: Daily Challenge Rules & How to Win

Wordiply Today is the daily edition of Wordiply, the Guardian's popular daily word puzzle and word-building game. Each day brings a new starter word, and you get five attempts to build the longest valid English word containing that starter. Unlike Wordle, there is no hidden answer to guess and no coloured tiles — the challenge is pure vocabulary and word knowledge: how long a word can you construct around today's starter? For more word-building play, try our guide to Parseword or learn how to play Plusword. The official daily game is free at wordiply.com.

What Is Wordiply Today?

Wordiply Today refers to the current day's Wordiply challenge. Every day, the game presents a fresh starter word — usually three or four letters long, such as "tie" or "are" — and gives you five guesses. Each guess must be a real English word that contains the starter letters together, in the same order.

The game was created by the Guardian's literary editor, David Shariatmadari, who was asked by a fellow Guardian editor to devise a rival to Wordle after writing a January 2022 article on winning at Wordle using linguistic theory. He consulted experts including data journalist and former competitive Scrabble player Oliver Roeder, NYU game professor Clara Fernández-Vara, and former New York Times game designer Sam Von Ehren, with his brother Daniel helping shape the final concept.

You can play the daily game free at wordiply.com, which carries the title "Wordiply | The Guardian".

How to Play Wordiply Today: The Rules

The rules are straightforward:

1. Read today's starter. The game shows you a short starter word or letter sequence for the day.
2. Build a longer word. Think of a real English word that contains the starter letters consecutively and in order. For example, with the starter "tie", you could play "responsibilities".
3. You have five attempts. Use all five guesses to try to beat your own longest word.
4. The starter must stay intact. The starter letters cannot be rearranged or separated. If the starter is "age", your answer must visibly contain A-G-E together, as in "management".
5. Longer is better. Your score is measured against the longest possible word for that starter.

How Scoring Works

Wordiply scoring has two parts:

• Length score: your longest guess compared with the longest possible word for the starter, expressed as a percentage. If the longest possible word is 15 letters and your best is 12, you score 80%.
• Letter score: the total number of letters across all five of your guesses. Five 12-letter words would give a letter score of 60.

The closer you get to the longest possible word, and the more letters you use in total, the higher your final score.

Wordiply Today vs Wordle: Key Differences

Strategies for Today's Wordiply

• Start with a safe long word. Open with a solid, familiar word containing the starter to bank a decent score, then experiment.
• Think in prefixes and suffixes. The easiest way to stretch a starter is to add common beginnings and endings: "un-", "re-", "pre-", "-ness", "-tion", "-ment", "-ing".
• Work both sides. The starter does not have to sit at the front. "Are" hides in the middle of "warehouse" and "nightmare", and at the start of nothing obvious — always check all positions.
• Try word families. Once you find a good stem, explore its relatives: "prepare" leads to "prepared", then "preparedness".
• Use all five guesses. Never submit a word much shorter than your best unless you are testing a promising new word family.
• Think of compound words. Long compounds are gold: "responsibilities" from "tie" is the classic example.

Example: Starter "ERA"

Where to Play Wordiply Today

The official daily game is at wordiply.com, run by the Guardian, and it is free to play in your browser with no download or account needed. A new starter appears each day. The Guardian also features Wordiply in its relaunched app alongside its other puzzles, and several independent fan sites offer practice tools and solvers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The biggest Wordiply mistake is treating guesses like Wordle guesses — burning all five attempts on short, safe words. Every guess should be a genuine attempt at a longer word, because only your longest valid entry counts. A second common error is forgetting the starter can sit anywhere: players see "STR" and only think of words beginning with STR, missing longer options like "STRAIGHT" or "RESTRAIN" where the letters sit mid-word. Third, many players stop at the first decent word they find. Before committing, scan for easy extensions — prefixes like RE-, UN- and DE-, suffixes like -ING, -ED, -S and -LY — which routinely add two or three letters. Finally, don't waste a guess "testing" a word you're unsure is valid; check a dictionary first, because an invalid entry still costs you one of your five attempts.

If you enjoy Wordiply, try the Waffle word game or our Guardian sudoku guide.

Advanced Wordiply Techniques

Once you can reliably find decent words, these techniques push your length scores toward 100%.

• Build from both ends. The starter can sit anywhere in your answer, so try extending it forward with suffixes (-ING, -ED, -ER) and backward with prefixes (UN-, RE-, DIS-). Most players only extend one way and leave letters on the table.
• Think in word families. A starter like ERA belongs to a family: ERA, ERAS, OPERA, OPERATE, OPERATION. Walking the family tree systematically finds longer words faster than random brainstorming.
• Use a dictionary for training, not cheating. Looking up the longest word after you submit teaches you patterns for tomorrow. The goal is a bigger mental word list, not a perfect score today.
• Watch the letter count. Your length score compares your word to the longest possible, so a starter with a high ceiling rewards ambitious guessing. Short starters are about efficiency; long ones are about exploration.