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’re playing for yourself, you can arrive at the answer any way you like. And maybe that means you want a hint sometimes.
Wordle is a tricky one if you want just a bit of a hint, but don’t want the whole thing spoiled. If you were doing a crossword, you could google a few clues and rely solely on brainpower to solve the rest. But Wordle is literally one word, and it’s only five letters, and either you know it or you don’t. If you’re lucky to have a friend who solves it before you, you might ask what letter it starts with, or to give you a hint about the word’s general meaning. (One day I saw a tweet that mentioned both Wordle and stomach troubles, 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 from? It turns out there’s an easier way: Check Google News.
There are a few outlets that publish Wordle hints and answers every day. One in particular, called Try Hard Guides, gives plenty of hints in its headlines, obviously targeted to people who are searching mid-puzzle. Things like “5 Letter Words With OAS in the Middle,” or “5 Letter Words Starting With ST and Ending With G.” (These refer to different puzzles, of course.) You could just stop there—if you know there’s a G in it somewhere, seeing that headline might help you place it without taking an extra guess.
You can go straight to the source by checking out Try Hard Guides’ Wordle page; there’s a spoiler-free hint article published every day, it seems. Other places to find hints include Gfinity Esports (which gives hints about the meaning of the day’s word) and Express.co.uk (which tells you the starting letter and the number of vowels).
Better yet, if you want more personalized help, check out Try Hard’s solver tool. You can enter your yellow and green letters for any Wordle puzzle and get a list of possibilities and suggested guesses.
If you want something more oblique, I like the Scrabble Word Finder, which allows you to put in some letters you know are in the word, alongside up to two question marks to represent mystery letters. It’s good for when you know three of the letters but don’t know exactly where they should go. It’s not calibrated to Wordle’s dictionary, so you’ll get plenty of weird Scrabble words that you have to wade through. The extra work means it still feels like a puzzle, in my opinion—sort of like when you’re in a video game and have to go on a side quest to find a key to open a locked door.