Word500 is a daily five-letter deduction game in which you have eight attempts to identify a hidden word. Type a word and press Enter, then use three counts—correct position, misplaced and absent—to work out which letters belong.
In our English Standard Daily on 29 October 2026, STARE returned 0 green, 1 yellow and 4 red. That left exactly one of its letters in the answer, in a different position, without identifying which one. We eventually won in five guesses without using Hint or viewing a solution.
What the three numbers tell you
STARE’s green zero ruled out an exact-position match, its yellow one required one misplaced letter, and its red four accounted for the absent letters. The totals did not label S, T, A, R or E individually.
Our second word, CLOUD, produced 1 green, 0 yellow and 4 red. One of those five letters was correctly placed, and the other four were absent. THINK then returned the same numbers. Matching totals did not mean matching letters: we still had to decide which position each word had identified.
CHIPS changed the problem. Its 0 green, 0 yellow and 5 red ruled out all five letters at once. C could no longer be CLOUD’s green match, while H and I could no longer be THINK’s. S was also eliminated from STARE’s possible misplaced letters. Our next submission solved the puzzle with 5 green, 0 yellow and 0 red, followed by “Splendid!”
Before our fifth guess, we needed a word compatible with all four rows: one misplaced letter from STARE, one exact match each from CLOUD and THINK, and none from CHIPS. Checking those conditions together was more useful than treating the latest row as a fresh start.
Choose Standard with its restrictions in mind
The official rules say Standard answers cannot repeat letters and exclude some letters. That restriction matters when checking candidate words: a repeated-letter answer is outside the Standard search space. We tested English Standard on 29 October 2026; advice about eliminating repeated-letter candidates applies to that setting.
The finish opened statistics with one game played and a single entry in the five-guess distribution. Practice, Archive and other difficulty levels remain outside our play coverage. In this Standard round, CHIPS was the turning point: five absent letters gave us a firmer deduction than either of the earlier single-green results.
