Word Code

About the game

Word Code is a five-letter word puzzle with a simple promise: there is a secret word, and you have six tries to find it. Type any real English word of five letters and the game answers by colouring each tile. A green tile is the right letter in the right place, a yellow tile is a letter that is in the secret word but somewhere else, and a dark tile is a letter that does not appear in it at all. The on-screen keyboard keeps the same colours, so you can see at a glance which letters you have already ruled out.

The fun is in the second and third guesses. A good first word tests common letters, and from then on every answer is a small logic problem: if the A is in the word but not in the second place, where can it be, and which words still fit every clue you have? Repeated letters are handled the way the genre expects, so a word with two Es can give you a yellow and a dark E in the same guess.

Guesses must be words in the game's dictionary of about 200,000 English words, but the secret words are picked from the more common ones, so you are never asked to find something nobody has heard of. When you win, the line above the board says in how many guesses; if you run out of tries, it tells you the secret word. There is no limit to the number of puzzles: New Game deals a fresh word whenever you want.

Playing it here

Click Play and wait a moment while the word list loads, a couple of megabytes. Then type with your keyboard or press the keys on the screen, and send each guess with Enter. Under the keyboard, New Game starts another puzzle, and New Custom Puzzle opens a box where you can type a secret word of your own: hand the device to a friend and let them try to find it. The game saves your board in this browser, so you can close the page in the middle of a puzzle and come back to it. The Options button in the corner changes the colour scheme and can bring back earlier games.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Spend the first guess on information. A word with several different common vowels and consonants tells you much more than one that repeats a letter.

Use dark tiles as much as green ones. Knowing that a letter is not in the word removes many candidates at once, and a good second guess often avoids every letter you have already ruled out.

Check the spelling of the word you want. The word has to be in the dictionary to count: an unknown word is refused with a message in the line above the board and does not cost you a try.

FAQ

Is there a daily puzzle? No. Every puzzle is picked at random when you start it, and you can play as many as you like in a row.

Can I play in another language? No, the dictionary and the puzzles are in English only.

Can two people play? Not at the same time, but with New Custom Puzzle one person types a secret word and the other guesses it on the same device.

Does it need the internet while I play? Only to load the page and the word list. After that, nothing is sent anywhere.

Credits and licence

Word Code is one of the games of the AlexGames collection, made by Alex Barry as a small Lua program on his own game engine, and it is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The engine, the Lua interpreter (MIT licence) and the game run in your browser as WebAssembly. The dictionary is built from the open word list of Wordnik (MIT licence) with word frequencies from the wordfreq package by Robyn Speer, whose data come from sources such as Google Books Ngrams, Wikipedia and OpenSubtitles and are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. We removed the online multiplayer, the zip upload and the links to other sites from the page; nothing else in the game was changed. Because the licence is the AGPL, the complete source of the version played here, the patch and the build script are linked from this page, together with the licence texts.