How to Get a Wordle Hint Without Spoiling the Whole Thing

Look, games are for having fun. I’m not going to judge how you play Wordle or Solitaire or any other game where “cheating” is an impossible concept. If you play for yourself, you can find the answer any way you want. And maybe that means sometimes you want a hint.

Wordle is a tough question if you only want one a little of a clue, but don’t want the whole thing spoiled. If you were to solve a crossword, you could google a few clues and rely on intelligence alone to solve the rest. But Wordle is literal a word, and it’s only five letters, and you either know it or you don’t know it. If you’re lucky enough to have a friend solve it in front of you, you can ask what letter it starts with or give you a clue as to the general meaning of the word. (One day I saw a tweet that mentioned both Wordle and stomach upset, and after a guess or two that day, it clicked — the word was ULCER.)

But what if you don’t have a buddy to crib with? It turns out there is an easier way: Check Google News.

There are a few outlets that post Wordle tips and answers every day. One of these, called Try Hard Guides, has a lot of clues in its headlines, obviously aimed at people searching mid-puzzle. Things like “5 letter words with OAS in the middle” or “5 letter words that start with ST and end with G”. (These relate to different puzzles, of course.) You could just stop here — if you know there’s a G in there somewhere, the heading might help you place it without having to make an extra guess.

You can go straight to the source by checking out Try the Hard Guides Wordle page; Apparently, a spoiler-free advisory article is published every day. Other places where you can find clues include: Gfinity Esports (who gives clues to the meaning of the day word) and Express.co.uk (which tells you the first letter and the number of vowels).

Better yet, if you want more personal help, check out Try Hard’s solver tool. You can enter your yellow and green letters for each Wordle puzzle and get a list of possibilities and suggested guesses.

If you want something quirkier, I like that Scrabble word finderwith which you can enter some letters knows are in the word, alongside up to two question marks that represent mysterious letters. It’s good if you know three of the letters but aren’t quite sure where to put them. It is Not calibrated to Wordle’s dictionary, giving you lots of weird Scrabble words to dig through. The extra work means it still feels like a puzzle in my opinion – a bit like being in a video game and having to embark on a side quest to find a key to open a locked door.