Avoid Word Traps

What Makes a Word a "Trap"?

In hard mode, every letter you've already found has to be reused in later guesses — you can't freely test new letters just to gather information. That's a problem when a whole family of words shares the same ending, like _IGHT (MIGHT, LIGHT, SIGHT, FIGHT, NIGHT, TIGHT, RIGHT). Once the ending is locked in, you're stuck guessing the one or two letters that actually differentiate the word — these ending families are the word traps that give this page its name, often with limited tries left to escape them.

Our dictionary counts 15 words ending in _IGHT — most players will only ever see the familiar eight (EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT), but AIGHT, BIGHT, DIGHT, HIGHT, KIGHT, PIGHT, and WIGHT exist too and can occasionally surface. The same pattern holds for other endings: _ATCH covers 10 words (the familiar BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH, WATCH, plus GATCH, NATCH, and RATCH), and _OUND covers 9 (BOUND, FOUND, HOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND, WOUND, plus the rarer LOUND).

Beating Hard Mode

Before hard mode locks you in, try to front-load guesses that probe common word endings — if you suspect a trap family, use a guess to test a couple of the most likely leading letters at once. This page groups every word trap in our dictionary by word length and ending, with a tip on which opening letters to try first based on how often they occur in that family.