How to play The Big Word
Every day at midnight, one new big word arrives — a single 10-letter English word, the same for every player in the world. You have 8 guesses to find it. Solve it and your streak grows; miss it and the word is revealed at the end.
Reading the colors
After each guess, every letter you played is colored:
- Green — this letter is in the big word, in exactly this position.
- Yellow — this letter is in the big word, but in a different position.
- Gray — this letter is not in the big word at all.
Duplicate letters are counted honestly: if you play a word with two E's and the big word only contains one, only one of your E's will light up. The on-screen keyboard remembers everything you've learned so far.
Probe words — the twist
Ten-letter words are hard to summon on demand, and that's by design. So The Big Word lets you guess any valid word of 5 letters or more. We call the short ones probes: they line up from the left edge of the grid and get scored against the full big word, so a green on a probe means that position is solved, and a yellow means the letter is hiding somewhere in the big word. A probe can never win — only a full 10-letter guess can do that — but probes are how you hunt. Little words chasing the big one.
A worked example
Suppose the big word were TABLESPOON. A player might open with the probe STORM:
Three yellows — S, T, and O are all in the word, just not in those spots — and R and M are eliminated everywhere. A second probe, PLANET, digs deeper:
Every letter hit! And that green E pins position five exactly. Ten of the big word's letters are now known or suspected from just two small words — the endgame becomes an anagram puzzle, and TABLESPOON falls on the next guess.
Strategy guide
- Open with vowels and common consonants. The most frequent letters in English are roughly E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R — probes built from these eliminate or confirm huge swaths of the alphabet quickly. Month names like FEBRUARY and SEPTEMBER are legal guesses here, and they're vowel-rich probes.
- Greens on probes are gold. Because probes align to the left edge, an early green locks a position permanently. Words starting with common openers (S, C, P, T, B) test valuable territory.
- Watch for double letters. Ten-letter words love them — think of words with double S, double E, double L. If your yellows don't seem to fit anywhere, ask whether a letter appears twice.
- Count what you know before going big. A full 10-letter guess spends a precious row, so make it when your known letters genuinely constrain the answer. With 8 guesses, a common rhythm is three or four probes, then one or two educated big swings.
- Think in word shapes. Many 10-letter words are compounds (two small words glued together) or common stems with endings like -TION, -NESS, -ABLE, -MENT, or -ING. If you have a yellow T, I, O and N, try imagining the word ending in -TION and work backwards.
Bonus words
Finished the daily? The stats screen offers +1 bonus word — an extra, unranked puzzle drawn from the deck, up to ten per day. Bonus rounds are for practice and fun: they never touch your streak or statistics.
Streaks and stats
Your games played, win rate, guess distribution, and current streak are stored privately on your own device. Come back daily to keep the streak alive — the countdown to the next big word is always ticking in the stats screen.