3-letter word game. Three tiles, six guesses, and it's over before your tea cools. Play as many as you like.
Boss walking over? Hit Esc twice. Go on, try it.
Fine, show me some hints
If you want to win
- ATE then ION. Six letters, four vowels, no overlap.
- Find the vowel first. On this board it is most of the puzzle.
Things this board does
- 81.6% have exactly one vowel.
- Only 8.4% repeat a letter, the lowest of any board here.
- T finishes 14.4% of them.
If you want to lose slowly
- Open with three consonants. Bold. Wrong, but bold.
Today's riddle
Come back in a moment - this one loads with the page.
Answer goes up tomorrow. No cheating, it's in the source and I'll know.From Conundrums, Riddles and Puzzles, Penn Publishing Company, around 1900. Public domain, via Project Gutenberg. A new one every day, and 397 of them before it starts repeating.
About the 3-letter mode
Three letters is the fastest way into a Wordle-style game. The rules are identical to the classic board - guess the hidden word, read the green, yellow and gray tiles - but with only three slots to pin down, a round takes well under a minute. It is the mode we recommend for kids, brand-new players, and anyone who wants a 30-second warm-up before a longer board.
Easy is not the same as trivial. This mode draws on 299 curated answers and accepts 2,126 valid guesses, and the short board actually punishes sloppiness harder than the long ones do: with only three tiles, a wasted guess burns a third of the information you could have bought.
What the 3-letter answer list actually looks like
We measured every answer in this mode. Three numbers should change how you play it:
| Measurement | Value | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Answers with exactly one vowel | 81.6% | Find the vowel and you have located a third of the word |
| Answers with a repeated letter | 8.4% | Lowest of any board here - assume three different letters |
| Answers with a double letter (AAB) | 5.4% | Rare enough to ignore until you are stuck |
The single most useful pattern is where the vowel sits. In the middle slot, A appears in 23.4% of answers, I in 17.4% and O in 16.4% - so those three vowels alone account for well over half of all middle letters. If your opener puts a vowel in position 2 and it comes back gray, you have eliminated a very large slice of the list in one move.
The ending is the next best lever: answers finish with T 14.4% of the time, then N 11%, D 9.7%, E 9% and Y 9%. Across the whole word, the most common letters are A (34.1% of answers contain one), T (22.7%), E (22.4%), O (21.7%) and I (20.7%).
Best opening words for 3 letters
Ranking every answer by how much of the list its distinct letters cover, the strongest single openers are ATE, EAT and TEA - the same three letters, which between them touch A, T and E, the three most frequent letters in the pool. ANT, APT and PAT follow closely.
The strongest two-word opening that shares no letters is ATE then ION. That pair tests six distinct letters including four of the five vowels, which on a three-slot board is close to the practical maximum. If both come back entirely gray you have already ruled out the overwhelming majority of the answer list. Full reasoning, and the equivalent pairs for longer boards, are in the strategy guide and the word statistics page.
3-letter mode FAQ
Is the 3-letter mode good for kids?
Yes - it is the mode we built with families in mind. The answer list is hand-filtered to common, school-friendly words, rounds take under a minute, and the on-screen keyboard means no typing skills are needed. The low repeated-letter rate (8.4%) also means children rarely hit the confusing case where the same letter appears twice.
Do I still get six guesses?
Yes, the classic six. With only three letters that is deliberately generous, which is exactly why this mode is the best place to learn how the green, yellow and gray clues work before moving up.
Can adults enjoy 3-letter rounds?
Treat it as a speed mode. The interesting challenge is not winning - it is winning in two guesses. Open with ATE, use the middle-slot vowel frequencies above, and you will convert a surprising number of rounds on guess two.
Why are there only 299 answers?
Because we filter the answer list to words an ordinary player would actually recognise. The dictionary contains far more three-letter strings, and 2,126 of them are accepted as guesses - but obscure ones are never chosen as the hidden word. You are never going to lose to a word you have not heard of.