Hard mode changes one rule: any letter Wordle has revealed must be used in your later guesses. Greens stay where they are, and yellows have to appear somewhere. That sounds like a small change until you land on _IGHT with three guesses left and realize that LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT, FIGHT and EIGHT are all still possible.
Those clusters are called trap families: words that share four letters in the same places and differ by just one. In normal mode you can escape them by guessing a word that tests several of the missing letters at once. In hard mode you cannot, because every guess must keep the greens. This guide uses the word list behind JumbleFix to show where those traps are and how to stay out of them.
How many traps are there?
We took the 5,932 five-letter words in our list that do not end in S (Wordle answers are rarely plurals), and grouped together every set of words that match in four positions.
- 249 families have five or more members. In a family of five, a hard-mode player with four greens can need every remaining guess.
- 74 families have seven or more. Those are the ones that end streaks.
- 20.8% of these five-letter words belong to a family of five or more. One word in five is a potential trap.
Some of the biggest, with the everyday members named:
- _IGHT, 12 words in the list, including EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT and TIGHT.
- _ATER, 11 words, including CATER, EATER, HATER, LATER and WATER.
- _OWER, 10 words, including COWER, LOWER, MOWER, POWER, ROWER and TOWER.
- _ERRY, 10 words, including BERRY, FERRY and MERRY.
Our list includes some uncommon words that Wordle will not use, so the real families are a little smaller. _IGHT alone still has eight everyday members, and that is more than six guesses can cover one at a time.
The trap is usually the first letter
Look at where the missing letter sits. Of the 249 families with five or more members, 145, or 58%, differ only in the first letter. The pattern is the same over and over: the end of the word is settled and the start is up for grabs.
That tells you what to test early. Across those first-letter families, the most common starting letters are B, T, C, D, H, P, L, R, M and F. Five of them together, B, C, D, H and T, cover 39% of all the words in those families, which no other five letters beat (swapping H for P does just as well).
How to stay out of the trap
Test first letters before you lock in greens. Your second guess is the last cheap chance to try several consonants, because hard mode will soon force you to reuse what you have found. A second guess that starts with B, C, D, H or T and contains other untested consonants does double duty: it hunts for new letters and narrows the first slot at the same time.
Prefer guesses that spend new consonants, not new vowels. Once you have found one or two vowels, the remaining uncertainty is almost always in the consonants. Families like _IGHT and _OWER have one fixed vowel pattern and many consonant options.
Notice the shape before you have four greens. If your greens and yellows already look like _ATER or _OWER after guess two, assume a trap is coming. Use guess three to test as many of the possible first letters as hard mode allows, rather than guessing the most likely single word.
When you are in the trap, play the odds you can see. With four greens and several options, pick the word whose first letter also appears in the most other candidates you have not ruled out. You cannot test more than one at a time anymore, so at least test the most common.
A worked example
Say your first guess, CRANE, comes back all grey, and your second, LIGHT, turns I, G, H and T green. The everyday words still possible are FIGHT, MIGHT, SIGHT and TIGHT, plus a few rare ones like BIGHT and WIGHT. You have four guesses left and four common candidates, and hard mode lets you test only one first letter per guess. If the answer is the last one you try, you finish on guess six; if Wordle picked a rare one, you lose.
The escape has to happen earlier. Had guess two spent its letters on likely first letters, say a word with F, M and S in it, the _IGHT family would have been cut down before the greens locked you in. That is the whole idea of hard mode strategy: spend information early, while you still can.
Checking what is left
When you are deep in a family and want to see every word that still fits, the Wordle helper takes your greens by slot, your yellows as Must Include and your greys as Exclude, and lists what remains. In hard mode, that list is worth a look before every guess from the third on.
A short checklist
- Open with a word that covers common letters.
- On guess two, test several consonants, especially B, C, D, H and T.
- If the pattern starts to look like _IGHT, _ATER or _OWER, expect a trap.
- Use guess three to rule out first letters, not to bet on one word.
- In the trap, pick the first letter shared by the most remaining candidates.
The trap families are not unfair. They are just very good at hiding in plain sight.
How we counted
We started from the ENABLE word list, a public-domain list used by many word games (172,823 words), and kept the 155,976 words that are also active on JumbleFix. We used the 5,932 five-letter words that do not end in S and grouped words that match in four of five positions. A family's size is the number of words in that group. Wordle's own answer list is smaller and leaves out uncommon words, so its families are smaller too.
Written by Morty Leonid with AI assistance. Every count in this article comes from queries against the JumbleFix word list.