What is a Word500?
Word500 is a word puzzle in which you find a hidden five-letter word in eight guesses, but instead of coloured tiles each guess is answered only with three counts: how many letters are exactly right, how many are in the word but misplaced, and how many are absent.
Also known as: counts-only word game, Bulls and Cows with letters.
How do you solve a Word500?
- 01
Open with five distinct letters and read the total
The three counts always add to five. What you learn from the first row is how many of your letters are in the word at all, and the sum of the exact and misplaced counts is the number to remember. An opener that scores zero present letters is not a wasted row: it removes five letters from the whole search.
- 02
Change one thing at a time
Because you are never told which letter earned a count, the way to find out is by comparison. Swap a single letter, or move one letter to a different column while keeping the rest, and the change in the counts tells you exactly what that one letter was doing.
- 03
Use the notes
Click a letter of any played guess to mark it green, yellow or red as a note to yourself, and the board will mark a row for you when its counts can only mean one thing. Keep the notes honest: mark only what the counts prove, not what you suspect, or a wrong assumption will poison every row after it.
- 04
Close with anagrams
Once you know the five letters, the endgame is arranging them. Each guess that keeps the letter set fixed and permutes their order changes only the exact count, which makes it a clean measure of how many are placed. Two such rows usually settle the order.
Common Word500 mistakes
- Playing it like the coloured-tile game. Guessing a plausible answer each row gives you a jumble of counts that are hard to compare; deliberate, controlled changes are what make counts readable.
- Ignoring the absent count. Five minus the present letters is how many of your guess to strike out, and a row with a high absent count has cleared more of the alphabet than an exciting-looking row with several hits.
- Marking notes from hunches. The board only colours what you tell it, so a guessed note looks identical to a proven one and will mislead you later.
Where does Word500 come from?
Answering a guess with counts rather than positions is the oldest form of this kind of game. Bulls and Cows, a pencil-and-paper game played long before computers, scored each guess with the number of digits in the right place and the number in the wrong place, and the board game Mastermind (1970, Mordecai Meirowitz) turned the same idea into coloured pegs. The five-letter coloured-tile version popularised by Wordle in 2021 replaced the counts with a verdict per letter, which is a far larger clue.
Word500 is this site's own game built on the older, stingier feedback. Its name comes from its answer pool: five hundred words selected not merely for being common but for being winnable, checked against a deliberately weak automated solver so that a real player always has room to spare. The tiles are only coloured for real once the game is over.
How many guesses do you get in Word500?
Eight. Counts carry much less information than coloured tiles, so the budget is two rows larger than the six of Daily Five, and even so a careful player needs most of it.
Is Word500 free, and how often does it change?
Word500 is free with no sign-up. A new word is published every day at midnight UTC, and a timed mode lets you solve as many words as you can against the clock. An account is only needed for the leaderboard. It plays on a phone as well as a desktop.