How to Play Jinxword

Jinxword is a daily word puzzle with one cruel rule on top of the classic formula. Here is everything you need to know before you spend your first candle.

The goal

Find the hidden five-letter word in six guesses or fewer. Every guess must be a valid English word — random letter combinations are rejected.

Reading the colors

• Green — the letter is in the word, in exactly that position.
• Yellow — the letter is in the word, but somewhere else.
• Gray — the letter is not in the word at all.
• Skull 💀 — the letter is cursed. It was never in the word, and it just cost you a candle.

In the example above, C is placed correctly, N belongs somewhere else, R and E are absent — and A turned out to be jinxed. One candle down.

The curse

Every day, four letters of the alphabet are secretly jinxed. Two facts about them matter:

• They are never part of the answer, so a revealed curse also eliminates that letter from the puzzle — painful, but informative.
• Each newly discovered cursed letter snuffs out one of your three candles 🕯️. When the third candle goes out, the round ends immediately and the word is revealed.

Once a cursed letter has been revealed, the game will refuse to let you play it again — no candle is ever lost twice to the same letter.

Winning and losing

You win by entering the exact hidden word within six guesses while at least one candle still burns. You lose when you run out of guesses — or out of candles. Either way, a new word arrives at midnight local time.

Daily game vs. practice

The daily puzzle is the same for every player on a given date and counts toward your streak and statistics. The 🎲 button starts an unlimited practice game with a random word — perfect for warming up, and never recorded.

Sharing your result

After each daily round you can copy a spoiler-free emoji grid — greens, yellows, blanks, and the skulls marking where the curse caught you — and send it anywhere.