How to play Rewind

What is a Rewind?

Rewind is a word puzzle in which you are shown a finished five-letter guessing game with the answer in green at the bottom and only the colours of the four guesses above it, and you must fill each row with a word that, scored against that answer, produces exactly those colours.

Also known as: Unwordle, reverse Wordle, Wordle backwards.

How do you solve a Rewind?

1. 01

   Start from the row nearest the answer

   The rows are independent and can be filled in any order, but the row directly above the answer is the most constrained, with the most greens, so it is the easiest to name. Take the greens as fixed letters, note which other columns are yellow, and the word is often obvious.

2. 02

   Translate each colour into a rule

   For a given row, a green square must hold the answer's letter in that column. A yellow square must hold a letter from the answer that is not in that column. A grey square must hold a letter that is not in the answer at all, or a repeat beyond what the answer contains. Write the three lists and the row becomes a fill-in-the-blanks.

3. 03

   Use the greys to reach for new letters

   A grey is a free choice from the twenty-one or so letters the answer does not contain. When a row has three greys, you are looking for any real word whose remaining two letters satisfy the green and yellow rules; try common consonant clusters in the grey columns until a word appears.

4. 04

   Handle repeated letters carefully

   Scoring follows the standard rule: greens are marked first, then yellows against whatever copies of a letter remain. So if the answer has one E and your row has an E green in one column, a second E in another column must be grey, not yellow. A row that looks right but is refused usually fails on a doubled letter.

Common Rewind mistakes

• Putting the answer itself into a row. It scores all green, no row is ever all green, and it is refused.
• Trying to find the setter's word. There is no single right answer for a row; any word producing the colours is correct, and looking for the one that was used is a needless restriction.
• Treating a grey as any letter. A grey letter must be absent from the answer, or a surplus copy of one it contains; a letter that is in the answer cannot be grey in a column where a copy remains unmatched.

Where does Rewind come from?

The idea of running a coloured-tile word game backwards followed quickly on the spread of Josh Wardle's Wordle in 2021 and its sale to The New York Times in 2022. Everyone had seen shared grids of green, yellow and grey squares with the letters removed, and the natural question was whether a grid like that could be solved: given the answer and the colours, what were the words?

Rewind is this site's own implementation of that puzzle type, sometimes called Unwordle. Each board is built by playing a plausible game forwards with common words, so every row has at least one everyday answer, and the setter's words have no special status: any word that makes the colours is correct, and most rows have dozens. A word that does not fit marks the squares it got wrong.