How to play Squareword — the free daily 5×5 word grid

Squareword takes the five-letter guessing puzzle that millions of people now play with their morning coffee and stacks it: instead of chasing one hidden word, you build five words at once on a square grid. There is a new grid every day, shared by everyone, so you can compare notes with friends. When the daily puzzle is done, an unlimited practice mode draws five fresh, valid row-words whenever you want more, and the answer archive lets you look back at grids you missed.

Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — type-set tiles, a plain-text result you can copy, and zero emoji anywhere in the experience.

It is also built to be read by everyone. Every scored cell carries a small glyph as well as a colour — a check for correct, a dot for present, a bar for absent — so the feedback never depends on colour alone, a detail that matters for the roughly one in twelve men who are colour-blind. The whole board renders as real input cells before any script runs, so it works on a slow connection and is fully keyboard-operable: type to fill a square, and Backspace and the arrow keys move you around.

The day’s grid is the same for every player and rolls over at midnight in your own time zone. Solve it and your streak ticks up; come back tomorrow to keep it alive. There is no timer pushing you to rush — the game rewards a careful read of each row over raw speed — and when you finish you can copy a tidy, spoiler-free summary of your solve to share. If you would rather warm up or keep going, the New puzzle button hands you an endless supply of fresh grids that never touch your daily streak.

The board is a 5×5 grid — five rows, five columns, twenty-five cells. There is a single rule that decides everything: every row must spell a valid five-letter word. The columns are along for the ride. They are simply the letters the rows happen to share, and they never have to spell anything, so you are not solving a full crossword square — only five words that stack neatly on top of one another.

You play by typing letters into the grid. Focus jumps to the next square as you go, and you can move around with Backspace and the arrow keys. When you are ready, press Check guess and every letter you have placed is scored. The important thing to understand is that scoring happens row by row: each row is judged against its own hidden word, exactly as a single line of Wordle would be. A letter’s mark tells you how it did within its own row — by both colour and a glyph:

Correct — jade tile with a check glyph: the right letter in the right cell of that row.

Present — amber tile with a dot glyph: the letter belongs in that row, but in a different cell.

Absent — slate tile with a bar glyph: the row has no use for that letter at all.

Because scoring is per row, a present mark always points sideways within the same row, never up or down a column. If a letter is amber in row three, it belongs somewhere else in row three — it says nothing about rows one, two, four or five. That is the single idea that turns Squareword from a puzzle you fight into one you read.

You win when all five rows are correct — five valid words, each in its right place. There is no fixed guess limit and no timer, so you can check as often as you like and refine the grid a cell at a time. Each daily Squareword has one accepted solution: we verify all five rows against a five-letter dictionary before publishing, so the grid you are handed always resolves to a single set of words.

Two features are there for when you stall. Hint fixes one correct letter in place and locks it so you cannot type over it; Show solution fills the whole grid and ends the round. Neither is needed to finish, but both are one tap away. A live read-out above the board keeps a running count of how many rows you have solved and how many guesses you have checked, in plain text rather than colour alone.

Say the hidden word for the top row is SLANT, and across that row you have typed SLATE. Here is how Squareword would score just that one row when you press Check guess:

S, L and A turn jade with a check — correct letters in the correct cells. T turns amber with a dot: it belongs in this row, just not in cell four. E turns slate with a bar: there is no E in this row’s word. Read together, those marks say the row starts S·L·A, still needs its T somewhere, and has no E — and with the T slotted into cell five, SLANT falls out on the next check.

Now for the part that makes Squareword more than five separate Wordles: those three correct letters do not just finish a row, they anchor three columns. The S you locked sits at the top of column one, the L at the top of column two, the A at the top of column three. Every one of those columns runs straight down through rows two to five. Because the finished grid is a single fixed solution, seeing S·L·A settled across the top gives you a scaffold to build the next rows against — you are no longer guessing five words in a vacuum, you are completing a shape whose top edge is already fixed.

Suppose row two is where you turn next. You already have a couple of its letters marked present from an earlier check — letters that are in row two but sitting in the wrong cells. Slide them along the row into the columns that are still open beneath your locked S, L and A, and test a word that fits. The columns never get scored, so they will never confirm a letter for you; but reading down them keeps your rows consistent and stops you from, say, jamming the same letter into a column where it plainly cannot lead anywhere. That back-and-forth — solve a row, let its correct letters seed the columns, then feed the neighbouring rows — is the whole rhythm of a Squareword solve.

Wordle popularised the correct-present-absent scoring that Squareword borrows, and we are happy to say so plainly: if you can read a line of Wordle, you can read a row of Squareword. What changes is the shape of the problem. Wordle gives you one hidden word to find; Squareword gives you five words at once, stacked into a grid, with the feedback worked out separately for each row. You are not solving harder words — you are solving five ordinary ones in parallel, and juggling how they share a set of columns.

The practical upshot is that Squareword rewards a different habit. In Wordle every guess is a whole word; in Squareword you fill the entire grid and check it, so a single guess can advance five rows at once, and a letter locked in one row quietly narrows what will fit the columns around it. The table below lays out the differences for the standard, signed-out experience of each.