7-letter word game. The big board: seven tiles, still only six guesses, and I genuinely don't know why I keep coming back.
Boss walking over? Hit Esc twice. Go on, try it.
Fine, show me some hints
If you want to win
- CERTAIN covers seven of the busiest letters in one go.
- Guess the suffix. -ING on its own is 16.3% of the answers.
Things this board does
- 67.5% repeat a letter. Two thirds.
- 53.5% have three vowels.
- -ING 16.3% and -ED 11.8%. Together, more than a quarter of the list.
If you want to lose slowly
- Play it like the 5-letter board. It is not the 5-letter board.
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 7-letter mode
Seven letters is where word nerds come to flex. The board barely fits on your phone, the 946-word answer pool is stacked with rich vocabulary, and six guesses suddenly feels like a very small budget. If the classic game stopped scaring you long ago, this is your mode.
The length cuts both ways, though: every guess reveals seven tiles of information, so a disciplined opener plus one good follow-up often cracks the word's skeleton. There is no shame in taking your time on a Tuesday.
The -ING rule: the most useful fact on this board
We counted every answer in this mode, and one pattern dwarfs everything else. 154 of the 946 seven-letter answers end in -ING. That is 16.3%, or roughly one round in six.
Nothing else on any board here is that concentrated. It shows up clearly in the positional data too: I is the most common letter in slot five (28.5%) and N the most common in slot six (22%), which is simply the -ING suffix leaving its fingerprint across the whole list.
The practical consequence is direct. If you have a G sitting in the final slot, or a floating yellow I and N with nowhere to go, test -ING immediately rather than hunting for a stem. Roughly one time in six that single move places three letters at once.
| Measurement | Value | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Answers ending -ING | 16.3% | Test the suffix before the stem |
| Answers ending -ED | 11.8% | The second most common ending |
| Answers with a repeated letter | 67.5% | Two answers in three repeat something |
| Answers with three vowels | 53.5% | More common than two vowels (38.9%) |
That 67.5% repeat rate is the other habit-breaker. Across the five boards the progression runs 8.4% at three letters, 19.7% at four, 28.8% at five, 52% at six and 67.5% here - so by seven letters, assuming every letter is different is actively wrong most of the time.
Beginnings matter more here than on any other board: C starts 11.9% of answers, ahead of S (9.7%) and P (9.5%), and CO- alone opens 5.3% of the list. Endings run E 18.6%, G 16.5%, D 13.4%, T 10.9% and Y 10%. The highest-coverage letters overall are E (66.2%), I (52.7%), R (48.4%), A (46.8%) and N (46.7%) - note that I ranks second here, far higher than on any shorter board.
Best opening words for 7 letters
Ranked by letter coverage across all 946 answers, the strongest openers are CERTAIN, TRAINED, ARTICLE, SENATOR and ROUTINE. CERTAIN is the standout: seven distinct letters, five of them in the top six by frequency.
The best follow-up is PROUDLY, which adds six letters CERTAIN never tests (P, O, U, D, L, Y) while overlapping only on R. Together they cover thirteen distinct letters and all five vowels. If you would rather use two words that share nothing at all, LASTING then PRODUCE works and has the side benefit of testing the -ING ending on move one. Full tables for every board length are on the word statistics page.
7-letter mode FAQ
Only six guesses for seven letters - is that fair?
That is the challenge, and it is more fair than it looks: each guess reveals seven tiles of information, so two good openers typically expose most of the word's structure. Win rates here run lower than the classic board - that is the point.
What kind of words can be answers?
946 common 7-letter words drawn from everyday English - think JOURNEY, KITCHEN, FREEDOM - not obscure dictionary trivia. If you lose, you will still recognise the answer.
I keep running out of guesses. Any advice?
Spend your first two guesses on coverage, not on winning - CERTAIN then PROUDLY tests thirteen distinct letters and all five vowels. Only start trying to solve from guess three. Players who try to win on guess two lose far more often here than on the shorter boards.
Is there a shortcut for long words?
Yes, and it is the -ING ending: 16.3% of answers use it. Combined with -ED at 11.8%, more than a quarter of every seven-letter answer is a suffix you can test directly. Solving the last three tiles first is often faster than solving the first four.
How many seven-letter words are accepted?
41,994 as guesses, against 946 possible answers - the widest gap of any board here. You can afford to spend a guess on a word you know cannot be the answer purely to eliminate letters.