Quick answer

Wordle uses three tile colours. Green means the letter is correct and in the right position. Yellow means the letter is in the answer but in a different position. Gray (grey) means the letter is not in the answer. In high-contrast mode the same meanings show as blue, orange, and gray.

What the Wordle colours mean

After every guess, Wordle scores all five tiles at once. Each colour is a separate instruction for your next row.

ColourHigh-contrastMeaningWhat to do
GreenBlueRight letter, right placeLock it in that slot
YellowOrangeRight letter, wrong placeReuse it in a different slot
GrayGrayNot in the answerDrop it, unless it is a duplicate copy
CRANE

Here A is green in position three, C is yellow so it belongs elsewhere, and R, N, and E are gray and can normally be set aside.

What does green mean in Wordle?

Green is the strongest clue in the game: the letter is in the answer and you put it in the right square. A green tile never needs to be revisited. For the rest of the puzzle, every guess you make should keep that letter in the same position.

If two copies of a letter both come back green, the answer contains that letter at least twice in those exact spots.

What does yellow mean in Wordle?

Yellow means the letter is in the answer, but not in the position you tried. The most common mistake is reading yellow as “close” or “one letter away.” It is not a distance clue. It only removes the single slot you used and tells you the letter lives in one of the other four.

Two yellow tiles for the same letter in one guess is a meaningful signal: the answer almost certainly contains that letter twice. See the double-letter guide for how to place both copies.

What does gray (grey) mean in Wordle?

A gray tile normally means the letter is not in the answer, so you should stop guessing it. British players often spell it “grey”; the tile and its meaning are identical.

The exception is duplicates. If your guess used a letter twice and only one copy is coloured, the gray copy does not mean the letter is absent. It means the answer has fewer copies than you played. One green E plus one gray E usually means exactly one E.

Wordle colours in high-contrast mode: orange and blue

If your tiles are orange and blue instead of yellow and green, high-contrast mode is switched on. It is designed for colour-vision deficiency and swaps the palette only:

  • Bluereplaces green — right letter, right place.
  • Orangereplaces yellow — right letter, wrong place.
  • Grayis unchanged — not in the answer.

Some players describe the orange tiles as “red.” There is no red tile in Wordle. If you want to turn this palette on or off, or you are seeing it by accident, read how to get (or remove) a red or orange square in Wordle.

When the colours look wrong

Almost every “Wordle colour bug” is really the duplicate-letter rule working as intended. Wordle assigns greens first, then yellows only while the answer still has unmatched copies of that letter, then gray for anything left over. So a single letter can legitimately show green and gray, or yellow and gray, in the same row.

Rule of thumb:count every green and yellow copy of a letter in a row first. Only then read a gray copy of that same letter — and read it as a limit on the count, not as a removal.

Turn each colour into your next guess

  1. Fix the greens. Every future guess keeps green letters in their slots.
  2. Move the yellows. Include each yellow letter, but never in a slot it has already failed.
  3. Drop the grays. Avoid confirmed gray letters, after checking they are not duplicate copies.
  4. Spend spare slots on information. When several answers still fit, use untested common letters rather than repeating known ones.

For the whole rule set around these colours, see how to play Wordle, and for choosing between candidates that all fit, the strategy guide. You can also paste your row into the Wordle solver and let it filter.

Sources and further reading