About Don't Just Guess
The word game that never says "come back tomorrow".
Why this game exists
Daily word games taught millions of people to love a very specific five-minute ritual - and then told them to wait 24 hours for more. Don't Just Guess exists for everyone who finished the daily puzzle and thought: again. It keeps the part people love (six guesses, colored tiles, the little rush when the row turns green) and removes the part nobody asked for (the waiting).
What makes it different
- Truly unlimited - a new word the instant a round ends. Pressing Enter after a win starts the next round.
- Five board sizes - from a kid-friendly 3-letter mode to a punishing 7-letter board, each with its own curated answer pool.
- A daily too - one shared word per day with streak tracking, kept separate from unlimited stats.
- Classic hard mode for purists who want every clue enforced.
- A word journal - every answer you meet is saved with its dictionary definition, so your vocabulary grows as a side effect of playing.
- Respectful by default - free, no account, no download, dark and light themes, a high-contrast palette for color-vision accessibility, reduced-motion support, and full keyboard play.
- Installable and offline-capable - after your first visit it works without a connection.
Under the hood
Don't Just Guess is a hand-built, dependency-free web game - plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no frameworks and no account system. Your statistics live in your browser's local storage and never leave your device.
The dictionaries are compiled from open-license word lists: the dwyl/english-words project (The Unlicense) supplies the valid-guess dictionaries, and the answer pools are drawn from the most common English words per the google-10000-english list, hand-filtered for fairness and family-friendliness at every board size. Word-journal definitions come from the free Free Dictionary API, with deeper links to Wiktionary.
How the answer lists are built
This is the part of the game that takes the most work, and it is worth explaining because it is what separates a fair word game from a frustrating one.
Every board keeps two separate lists. The guess list is deliberately huge - it accepts anything a dictionary would recognise, so you are never told a real word "isn't a word". The answer list is much smaller and hand-filtered, because losing to a word you have never seen is not a challenge, it is just annoying. The gap between the two grows with length:
| Board | Possible answers | Accepted guesses |
|---|---|---|
| 3 letters | 299 | 2,126 |
| 4 letters | 775 | 7,179 |
| 5 letters | 861 | 15,909 |
| 6 letters | 977 | 29,870 |
| 7 letters | 946 | 41,994 |
Answers are filtered on four rules: the word must appear in a common-usage frequency list; it must be spellable by an ordinary adult without a dictionary; it must be family-friendly, since the 3-letter board is explicitly built for children; and it must not be a proper noun, abbreviation or inflected form that only technically exists. Anything failing one of those stays in the guess list but is never chosen as a target.
Because we control the answer lists, we can also measure them. The word statistics page publishes that analysis in full - letter frequencies, positional odds, repeated-letter rates and the highest-coverage opening words, all computed from these exact lists rather than from general English.
Accuracy and corrections
Every statistic published on this site is computed directly from the word bank files the game ships to your browser, so the figures describe the lists actually in play. They are recalculated whenever a list changes, and the pages that carry statistics show the date they were last recomputed.
We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If a number looks off, a word seems unfair, or a definition is inaccurate, email us and we will recheck it and correct the page. Where a correction changes a published figure, we update the recomputation date so you can tell the page moved.
Advertising
The site is free to play and supported by a small number of display ads. Ads are clearly labelled, kept out of the game area and away from the controls, and never disguised as game content or navigation. They are governed by our privacy policy, where you can also manage your consent choices. We do not run interstitials, pop-ups, autoplaying video or anything that interrupts a round in progress.
Contact
Found a bug? Convinced a word is missing from the dictionary? Spotted a mistake in the statistics? Want to say hi?
Email: donotguesstheword@gmail.com
This is a small independent project, not a company with a support desk, so replies come from a person rather than a queue. We read everything and usually respond within a few days. Useful things to include: which board you were on (3 to 7 letters), whether you were in Daily or Unlimited, your browser, and the word involved if there was one.
Fair play and trademarks
Don't Just Guess is an independent game. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Wordle or The New York Times Company. WORDLE is a registered trademark of The New York Times Company, referenced on this site only to describe the style of game. Game mechanics are not subject to copyright; everything here - code, design, word lists and text - is an original implementation built from the open-license sources credited above.