JARGON

Five letters, six guesses, one word a day for everybody. Green means right letter in the right place, yellow means the letter is in the word somewhere else, grey means it is not in the word at all. Duplicate letters mark the way they do in Wordle: greens are claimed first and yellows only consume what is left over.

If you have not got it by your fifth guess, a hint appears. Sixty of the answers carry one.

You can only guess in business English

This is the part that makes it a different game from Wordle. Guesses have to come from a 520-word glossary of office vocabulary. CRANE is a real word and it will be rejected. CHURN, BASIS, AGILE and ASSET are the sort of thing that is in.

It sounds like a restriction and it is really a hint. Every guess you are permitted to make is a candidate, so the distribution you are playing against is not English, it is the language of a quarterly review. There are 220 possible answers rather than thousands, and they lean hard on a handful of letters: E turns up in 53% of them, S in 44%, then R at 38%, A at 37%, and O and T at 32% each.

Openers that suit this dictionary

The usual Wordle openers are tuned for general English and waste guesses here. On those numbers RATES is about the best opener available: five distinct letters and it covers five of the six commonest in one go. AUDIT is the thematic pick and still a decent one, though it only tests two of them. ASSET and BOARD are useful second words, because they probe the doubled-letter shapes that keep coming up.

What you should not do is open with something clever and obscure. A word that is barely in the glossary tells you very little when it comes back all grey, because it was never likely to share letters with the answer.

Tactics

• Yellow on S usually means the end. Business words pluralise constantly: 69 of the 220 answers finish with an S. If S comes back yellow, test the last position before you go looking in the middle.
• Do not chase a single yellow. With six guesses and a pool of 220, one more spread-out probe usually beats committing to a word built around one confirmed letter.
• Take the hint. It arrives on guess five, not as a penalty. There is no scoring bonus for refusing it.

Where the words come from

The answers and the glossary are both curated by hand. The answer never reaches your browser: you post a guess to the server and get back the colours only, so the word is not sitting in the page waiting to be read out of the developer console. Everybody gets the same word on the same UTC day.