Make a Custom 6 Letter Wordle Puzzle

Four steps from word to link

1. Type your six-letter word in the box. Only words from this site’s list work, which keeps puzzles fair and rules out words that could offend. If a word is turned down, a short note appears and you can try another.
2. Read the hint under the box once six letters are in. It counts how many words from the list would still fit after a first guess of SINTER, and sorts the result into Gentle, Fair, Tough or Very tough.
3. Press Make link, then Copy link. Send it by text message, email or chat.
4. Your friend opens the link and lands on a board with six rows. All 18,195 words on the full list are accepted as guesses, and so is your word. When the game ends, they can copy a result without the answer or make a puzzle of their own.

What sits inside the link

The part after ?p= is 11 characters long. The six letters of your word are combined with a fixed key, a two-byte checksum is added and the bytes are written in base64url, a text form that is safe in web addresses. The checksum catches a mistyped or cut-off link, and the page then offers a friendly message and a way to make a new puzzle.

Here is what the code does and does not do. It hides the word from a quick glance at the address bar. It is not encryption, because the key sits in the page’s script and anyone who reads that script can reverse the code. When you make a link, the page checks your word against the displayed list, which leaves out words that could offend. The displayed list holds 18,094 words. That is the 18,195 words of the full list minus 101 hidden ones.

Following one link to the word CRITIC

A script took the word CRITIC, which is not on this game’s answer list, and made its link. It then played the puzzle the way a careful friend might, starting with SINTER and using the best-ranked guess among the words still possible.

After the opener, 8 candidates remained out of 18,094 on the displayed list. The second guess, ARCTIC, was one of those eight, and its colors pointed to CRITIC alone, so the puzzle ended on guess 3. Click the link above to play the same puzzle and try your own route.

Which words make hard puzzles

The measure is simple. After a first guess of SINTER, how many words from the displayed list still match the colors? The fewer that remain, the easier the puzzle is for a friend who opens that way. The tables use every displayed word, one at a time, as the secret word.

Repeated letters and endings stand out. Words with two or more repeats leave a median of 187, against 113 for six different letters, and words with J, Q, X or Z sit at 162. The -LY ending is the hardest at 215. The -ER ending goes the other way, at 90 against 132 for the whole list, because SINTER ends in ER and turns those two tiles green. Words ending in -ED have a typical median of 143 but a long tail, with a mean of 246.9, because so many of them land in the largest group described below.

The second table sorts words by how many of their letters also sit in SINTER.

The pattern is steep. A word that shares four or more letters leaves a median of 19, while a word that shares none or one leaves 462. Almost every word in that second group, 94 percent, leaves more than a hundred candidates.

The largest group of look-alikes holds 567 words, which come back with a green E in fifth place and nothing else. Of those, 445 end in -ED. The first table below lists three words with repeated letters and the second lists three with rare letters. All six sit in that group.

Choosing a fair word for friends

The answer list of this game doubles as a ruler. Put on the same scale, its 682 answers leave a median of 100 words, with the middle half between 45 and 226. The page uses those figures as its tiers: Gentle up to 45, Fair up to 226, Tough up to 462 and Very tough beyond that. 67 percent of displayed words land at Fair or better, and only 11 percent land in Very tough.

• Pick a word your friend has seen in daily games. A familiar word is fair even when the numbers look high.
• For a gentle puzzle, choose a word that shares several letters with common openers, or one that ends in -ER. These four past answers leave few candidates.

• For a hard puzzle, end the word in -LY or double a letter. Both push the count up without making the word obscure.
• Keep J, Q, X and Z for friends who ask for a challenge.
• Check the hint before you send. If it says Very tough, swap one letter for a common one.

Where these counts come from

A script produced these counts from the current lists, and a test recomputes them. SINTER leads the starter ranking and serves as the opener here. The displayed list is the full list minus the 101 hidden words, and the full list descends from the open Wordnik data whose license and thanks appear in the data credits on About. A friend can guess any of the 18,195 words on the full list.

The hint measures one thing: how well one opener narrows the field. It does not measure how well known a word is, and a friend who opens differently will see different counts. The tiers are rough bands taken from this game’s own list, not an official scale. If your friend gets stuck, the 6 letter Wordle helper can list the words that still fit.