Evil Wordle.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

THE DAILY ORDEALOpening the dictionary…One word. No mercy.
DAILY GAMEWAITING FOR YOU

Take a seat to wake the board.

4–12 letters. Accents count as letters.
✓ Right place↔ In the word? Might be a lie· Withheld

The fine print has teeth.

One new honest letter per valid guess. A blue tile that cannot be trusted. A board that forgets what it told you. The word has between four and twelve letters; whether you learn anything is another matter.

An independent word game. Historical Webster definitions preserve obsolete language and prejudices; they are not endorsements.

How to suffer

Find the daily word. It has 4–12 letters, including the occasional Ä, É, Ï, Ö, Ü or Æ. The same word awaits everyone; a new one arrives at midnight UTC.

  1. Truth is rationed. Each valid guess reveals only the first previously unconfirmed letter that belongs to the answer. Green means the right place; yellow means elsewhere. Uncolored letters are withheld, not ruled out. Repeated letters confirm membership, not a count.
  2. Blue is unreliable. One additional eligible tile turns blue. A coin toss chooses a letter inside or outside the answer. If the guess only has one kind available, that kind is used. Confirmed letters are never overwritten by blue.
  3. Invented words are welcome. They cost a turn, turn black, and earn no clues. At night they turn red.
  4. The board resents you. A short guess removes one empty column from the next row, down to four. A guess longer than the answer loses its last letter before dictionary checking. You can still type up to twelve letters on a narrowed board.
  5. Memory is temporary. Once you reach eight guesses, the oldest row falls away to make room. A letter’s certainty expires when the row that first revealed it leaves. Ordinary days have no guess limit.
  6. Success is relative. Solve in three or fewer guesses and you earn a musical diversion. Four through eight reveals the definition and today’s average. Beyond eight, expect slow applause and an extremely low score.
  7. Friday the 13th is different. Honest colors become blue, letters stop being cut, the type goes Gothic, and eight guesses really is the limit. Lose and the page disintegrates before sending you to another game.

Night colors follow your device clock, from 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Sound starts when you play and can be muted at any time. Reduced-motion settings are respected. A cookie remembers this browser’s game; completed games contribute once to today’s average. Records expire after fourteen days.

Inside the dictionary

81,136 defined headwords: 81,128 historical entries and eight attributed accent variants. Only single words of four to twelve letters in the game’s alphabet are included. Multiple senses are retained.

The base is a machine-readable transcription of the historical Webster unabridged dictionary. It is not a complete collection of Merriam-Webster editions published since 1895. The transcription can contain errors and omissions.

Racial slurs and other offensive historical terms have not been silently removed. Definitions are archival text, never language the game uses to address a player. Supplemental definitions were written for this game; their spelling references accompany the revealed entries.

Dictionary transcription and MIT license · Historical Webster text

Friday typography uses UnifrakturMaguntia, distributed under the SIL Open Font License.

The answer, similarity fingerprint, guesses and aggregate scores are evaluated on the server. No word game can be made immune to automated solving; this one does not ship today’s answer to your browser.