MasterWord Help

MasterWord is a guessing game with words; you use five-letter words to guess the computer's five-letter word. The computer has a library of nearly 4,000 words and chooses one of these words when it loads, so you're ready to begin right away.

You enter your word and the computer responds by telling you how many letters you have correctly guessed and, of those, how many are in the right place. Keep guessing until you can deduce enough about the computer's word to correctly guess it.

Entering Words

You start by choosing a 5-letter word and entering it into the box and pressing Submit.

How Did You Do?

The words you guess are displayed in a History section. Beside each word, you can see the number of letters in the computer's word and, of those, how many are in the right position.

Let's look at an example. To help you understand, you should know that the computer's word is GAUZE.

The first guess, WORDS, has 0 letters right, 0 in the right place. This means that none of the letters in WORDS is in the computer's word. Even though you got none right, this is actually a great guess! You'll see why.

The next word, QUOTA, has 2 letters right, but 0 in the right place. In other words, 2 letters in QUOTA are in the computer's word, but their position in QUOTA is not correct.

The third word, FLAKE, also has 2 letters right, but 1 of those letters (E) has the same position as the computer's word. So its score is 2 1.

See how the score works? Let's see it in more detail...

The second word guessed was QUOTA.

Q U O T A
G A U Z E

This guess returns a score of 2 0. In QUOTA, A is in the fifth place, but in the computer's word, GAUZE, it's in the second place. The letter U likewise is misplaced, so you have a score of 2 0.

The third guess, FLAKE, gives a score of 2 1.

F L A K E
G A U Z E

See how the E's line up? That's 2 letters right; 1 in the right place.

Tools

In the first guess, WORDS, the score of 0 0 is tremendously helpful. Because none of those letters are in the computer's word, you can click the link on each othe letters to gray them out and make it easier for you to see what letters remain valid to guess.

Also, every time you use a letter to guess, the letter tile is shaded yellow so that you can see what letters you've used.

Strategy

Now after the first 7 guesses, let's see how we might guess the computer's word.

From the 3rd guess through the 6th guess, 1 letter is always in the right place. In those guesses, the E is always in the same place. So it's logical that the computer's word has an E at its end.

If the E is right, then look at TRITE and WHILE. Only 1 letter was right in those words, and it must be E, so we can click on the other letters to gray them out.

When we gray out the letters S H R from the word SHARE, only A and E remain and it has 2 letters right, so A is also in the computer's word. That means that we can gray out the F and K from FLAKE. But look at QUOTA. Of the 3 remaining, only 2 are right. Because Q so rarely is used without a U, the Q has to go. So we know that U is a letter in the computer's word as well and we can start to guess what the computer's word looks like.

Scratchboard

The Scratchboard is a simple place where you can put the letters you feel are correct in place. It's just a work area, if you will.

For example, we know that the E is at the end of the word, but where would the A and U go? The A is not in the 3rd place or SHARE would have given a score of 2 2 instead of 2 1. It's probably not in the 4th place because words usually don't end with AE. So A is in the 1st or 2nd place - we'll guess 2nd. The U is now either in the 1st, 3rd, or 4th position. We'll guess 4th. Put these letters in the Scratchboard and then compare that to the letters that aren't grayed out to arrive at a new guess - in this case, VAGUE.

You continue to guess and narrow it down until you've arrived at the answer by guessing correctly.

How does the game score words with the same letter twice?

For example:

OTTER might be the computer's word.
OTHER might be your guess.

The score would be 4 4, because each letter in its place counts once.

O T T E R
O T H E R

Make sense? How about another...

LLAMA = the computer's word.
VALUE = your guess.