How to cheat at Wordle

The now established social-media craze is Wordle, the simple word game where you have six guesses to match the game’s five-letter solution. Five green squares means you’ve succeeded, and can rack up likes on Twitter and Facebook. But there are at least three simple ways to cheat at Wordle—including a way to discover Wordle’s word in advance for the next days or weeks — unless the new owner of Wordle ,The New York Times, changes the Wordle answers. We have Wordle spoilers! Use our Table of Contents to jump right to the Wordle answers for today as well as upcoming Wordle puzzles.

Update on May 9: The New York Times changed a programmed answer, “FETUS,” from Game 324. This accidentally coincided with the leak of the proposed reversal of Roe v. Wade, the original court ruling which preserved abortion rights. “This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence — today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year,” the Times wrote.

This story shows how you can predict the upcoming Wordle answers by looking at the site’s code. But the Times hinted that it may start funneling answers to players from another source, which would eliminate the primary method to cheat at Wordle. “We want to emphasize that this is a very unusual circumstance,” the paper wrote. “When we acquired Wordle in January, it had been built for a relatively small group of users. We’re now busy revamping Wordle’s technology so that everyone always receives the same word. We are committed to ensuring that tens of millions of people have a gratifying and consistent experience, every day.”

BoingBoing has also noticed that the future Wordle solutions have now diverged from the original Wordle site code, with some “ruder” answers removed. But you can still find the answers in the site code.

We have new Wordle spoilers, below, updated on June 14, as well as a couple of Wordle alternatives, below. And yes, you can argue that they’re getting harder, as there are a few more instances of duplicated letters in the Wordle solutions. There’s some upcoming Wordle puzzles that look especially devilish!

Want some Wordle alternatives? You can always try Octordle, a devilishly hard twist where you play four words at once, and with very few guesses. Or, if you’re feeling a bit NSFW, you can always give Lewdle a shot, which uses some, um, alternative words.

We’re not trying to ruin Wordle, which has become a fun activity for millions. But we couldn’t really ignore a Wordle hack that is literally right under your nose. And if you want to one-up a friend who is constantly bragging about their Wordle prowess, well….It’s really no different than the Pokemon Go maps of a few years ago, is it?

How to beat Wordle using WordHippo

Let’s start with Wordle 213, whose solution stumped Twitter. Many people discovered that the first three letters were P-R-O…and then absolutely failed to guess the last two letters, X and Y. Naturally, Wordlers probably considered more common words like “proud” and “prowl” first. But what words would make sense?

Enter WordHippo, a nifty little tool that allows you to select words with different characteristics. The link leads to “five-letter words beginning with PRO,” but the page includes an advanced word search of varying length, with a selection of letters that you decide, and in varying configurations. As you start ruling out letters, the site can give you a smaller and smaller pool of potential words to guess from. Using WordHippo isn’t necessarily a Wordle “cheat,” per se, but it’s close.

How to fake a Wordle win

You’ve had a bad day. You just want a quick Wordle win to make you feel good and to receive a few virtual pats on your back.

If you happen to win Wordle, great. But if you lose, Wordle will print the solution at the top of your screen. Simply open Wordle in Google Chrome’s Incognito Mode or the Microsoft Edge InPrivate mode, complete the puzzle (or not) and note the winning word. Then close the Incognito / InPrivate mode and play Wordle in your browser, with all of your cookies enabled. You’ll win Wordle, preserve your winning streak, and gain the approval of your friends.

How to hack Wordle: Find out tomorrow’s Wordle word

The final way of cheating at Wordle is much more insidious. Are you ready for the twist? All of the Wordle answers are already in Wordle.

Josh Wardle, who designed Wordle, clearly didn’t want to spend every day re-uploading a new puzzle, so he simply placed all of the solutions within the puzzle’s code. Since the Wordle puzzles refresh once per day, that means there are potential answers for a long, long time.

Specifically, the Wordle answers can be found within the Javascript that accompanies the Wordle site. (We didn’t discover this trick ourselves, but were tipped off to its existence by a source who wishes to remain anonymous.) Want to know the Wordle answers for tomorrow, the next week, or for the next few months or years? Here’s how to do it.

First, use Google Chrome to open the Wordle website. Using the Chrome “ellipsis menu” in the upper right, scroll down to More tools>Developer tools. The site contains a few Javascript files, though you can eliminate the Google tag manager and the index.

Instead, open the file underneath the index, which on the page I loaded was main.bd4cb59c.js. Yes, you’ll see a ton of code, much of which isn’t worth poking through. The solutions, however, are hidden in an array file, in plaintext. You can use Chrome’s “pretty print” feature, which should appear in a button at the top of the page. Otherwise, you can simply copy the entire text block into a text editor, or just something like Word.

There are a number of GitHub pages that have tried to calculate the methods of determining the next entry in the Wordle word list, like this one. But it seems that the Wordle site has already calculated the list of Wordle solutions for the next few months—because they’re right there in the source code. The easiest way to find that list is to simply look for the words that were the most recent solution. (We’ve tracked this for a day or two before publishing and it seems like the pattern has been consistent.) Simply do a Ctrl+F search for the most recent solution, then go to the next word in the list. That’s it!

Wordle spoilers: Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle

Spoilers ahead. If this pattern holds true, then here are the Wordle solutions for the next week. Remember, a new Wordle game goes live at midnight based on your time zone, so Wordle games may already be live in other regions of the world. Changing your PC’s clock to a day or two in advance doesn’t seem to make a difference—in other words, you can’t play a new round of Wordle early.

Tuesday, June 14: ATONE (Wordle #360)

Wednesday, June 15: PRIMO (Wordle #361)

Thursday, June 16: APRON (Wordle #362)

Friday, June 17: BLOWN (Wordle #363)

Saturday, June 18: CACAO (Wordle #364)

Sunday, June 19: LOSER (Wordle #365)

Monday, June 20: INPUT (Wordle #366)

Is Wordle ruined?

Of course not. There’s nothing preventing you from walking a golf course with a ball in your pocket, dropping it in the hole, and claiming a hole-in-one on every hole. If you want to play the game honestly, you can. If you don’t, you don’t. All this does is invalidate the online braggadocio about who’s better at Wordle. And let’s face it: All the developer (and now the New York Times would have to do is to randomize the solution every day to make this Wordle hack untenable.

In other words, just like a friendly game of cards, you can still play Wordle with friends, or to challenge yourself. Just be suspicious of anyone who finds the solution a little too easily. And as David Letterman says: Remember, no wagering!

This story was updated on June 14 to add some additional upcoming Wordle answers to the Wordle puzzles.

Gaming, Internet