4-letter word game. Short enough for a coffee break, long enough to ruin one. No daily limit.
Boss walking over? Hit Esc twice. Go on, try it.
Fine, show me some hints
If you want to win
- LATE then IRON. Eight letters, four vowels, no overlap.
- Half of these have exactly two vowels. Pin both down early.
Things this board does
- 22.2% end in E.
- 19.7% repeat a letter.
- 13.2% have a proper double, like BOOK. It will catch you out.
If you want to lose slowly
- Assume nothing repeats. One round in five will punish you for it.
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 4-letter mode
The 4-letter board is the sweet spot between speed and challenge. Rounds are noticeably quicker than the classic 5-letter game - most players finish in two to four guesses - but the 775-word answer pool is big enough that no two sessions feel the same. It is ideal for short breaks: a full round fits inside a coffee refill.
Everything you know from the classic game applies: six tries, green means the letter is placed correctly, yellow means it belongs elsewhere, gray means drop it. And because this is Don't Just Guess, the moment a round ends the next word is one tap away.
What the 4-letter answer list actually looks like
The four-letter board has one dominant structural fact, and most players never notice it: 22.2% of answers end in E. More than one word in five. No other letter comes close - T is next at 11.7%, then D at 9%, L at 8.1% and K at 7.2%.
That single statistic should shape your guessing. If you reach guess three with the last slot still unknown, testing E there is the highest-value move available on this board.
| Measurement | Value | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Answers ending in E | 22.2% | Test E in the final slot before anything else |
| Answers with two vowels | 50.2% | Almost a coin flip against one vowel (48.9%) |
| Answers with a repeated letter | 19.7% | Roughly one in five - do not rule repeats out |
| Answers with a double letter | 13.2% | -LL alone accounts for 3.7% of all answers |
Position two is the vowel seat: A appears there in 21.5% of answers, O in 20.8% and E in 15.5%, so those three cover well over half of all second letters. First letters are far flatter - S leads at only 9.9%, followed by T at 7.5% and B at 7.2% - which means opening guesses buy you much less information about the start of the word than about its middle and end.
Across the whole list, the letters that appear in the most answers are E (43.7%), A (35.4%), O (27.6%), L (24.8%) and T (24%).
Best opening words for 4 letters
Ranking all 775 answers by how much of the list their distinct letters cover, the strongest openers are LATE, TALE, EARL, REAL and RATE - unsurprisingly, anagram families built from E, A, R, L and T.
The strongest two-guess opening is LATE then IRON. The two words share no letters, so together they test eight distinct letters including four of the five vowels. On a four-slot board that is close to the maximum information you can buy in two moves. The word statistics page shows the equivalent pairs for every board length, and the strategy guide explains the reasoning.
4-letter mode FAQ
Is a 4-letter game easier than 5 letters?
Usually, but not always - fewer letters also means fewer clues per guess, and short words have many lookalikes (RACE, RICE, RIDE, RODE). Expect faster rounds, not free wins.
What words can be answers?
775 common, family-friendly 4-letter words, hand-filtered from a frequency list of everyday English. Obscure dictionary fillers can still be used as guesses, but they will never be the hidden answer.
Does the daily challenge use 4 letters?
No - the daily puzzle is always the classic 5-letter board so every player shares the same word. The 4-letter mode is unlimited only: play as many rounds as you like.
Why do so many 4-letter answers end in E?
Because English builds enormous numbers of short words on a silent final E: it turns CAP into CAPE, RAT into RATE, HID into HIDE. That pattern is concentrated at four and five letters, which is why 22.2% of the answers here end in E but only 9% of the three-letter ones do.
How many 4-letter guesses are actually accepted?
7,179 four-letter words are accepted as guesses, while only 775 can be the hidden answer. The gap is deliberate: you are free to burn a guess on an obscure word to test letters, but you will never lose to one.