Kata·Word

How to play Kata·Word

A hidden word, six attempts, and after every attempt the board tells you exactly how close you were. Type a real word of the right length, press Enter, and each letter turns one of three colours:

• Green — right letter, right position.
• Yellow — the letter is in the word, but not there.
• Grey — the letter is not in the word at all.

Pick your word length before you start — 4, 5 or 6 letters — and your language, English or Bahasa Indonesia. Both are complete games with their own word lists rather than one list translated, and they play quite differently; more on that below. The on-screen keyboard colours itself as you go, and a key is never downgraded: once a letter has gone green it stays green even if a later guess puts it in the wrong slot.

Repeated letters, the part everyone argues about

The board scores a guess in two passes. Greens are settled first and each one consumes its letter from the answer; only then are the leftovers considered for yellow, and a repeated letter goes yellow only while an unclaimed copy remains. This is worth internalising, because the naive version — colouring every letter that appears anywhere in the answer — would light both s's and quietly mislead you. When you guess a doubled letter and get one colour back, you have learned something precise: the answer contains exactly one of it.

Guesses have to be real words

The game will not accept letter salad. Every attempt is checked against a list of permitted guesses, which is much larger than the list of possible answers — so plenty of obscure words are legal to guess even though they will never be the solution. That asymmetry is a gift: you can spend a guess on a word you would never expect to be right, purely to test five new letters.

Strategy

Spend the first guess on coverage, not on a hunch

Your opening word cannot be wrong, only wasteful. What you want is five or six different common letters, mixing vowels and frequent consonants — in English something along the lines of slate, crane or raise; in Indonesian, words built from a, i, u, n, k, r, s, t and m earn their keep, because Indonesian leans on those far harder than English does. A guess with a repeated letter tests one fewer letter, which is why sassy is a poor opener however satisfying it feels.

Grey letters are information too

New players chase yellows and greens and treat greys as failure. Half of what you need is elimination: knowing that t, o and d are all absent narrows the field as sharply as a yellow does. If you have two guesses left and a dozen candidates, the strongest play is often a word that cannot be the answer but splits the remaining candidates cleanly in half.

Yellow means "not here" — use it

A yellow is two facts, not one: the letter is present, and that particular position is ruled out. On the next guess, deliberately move it somewhere new. Re-testing a yellow in the same slot spends a guess to learn nothing.

Short words are not easier

The four-letter game looks gentle and often is not. Fewer positions mean each guess carries less information, while the pool of four-letter words is dense enough that several candidates survive four greens' worth of clues — bake, bale, bane, base. Six letters gives you more room to deduce and more letters per guess; many players find it the most tractable of the three once they stop equating length with difficulty.

About the word lists

The lists are not a dictionary dump. The English answers were filtered using capitalisation across source texts as a proper-noun detector, so places and names do not turn up as solutions; the Indonesian lists were built from agreement between multiple dictionaries, which is what keeps out both regional spellings and words no player would recognise. The result is a list where every answer is a word you can reasonably be expected to know, and being beaten feels like being beaten rather than being cheated.

Word selection also has a short memory. A purely random draw repeats itself far sooner than the size of the list suggests — on a list of around 1,900 words, the first repeat is expected after roughly fifty-five games, not nineteen hundred. The game keeps track of what you have seen recently and rerolls past it, so a session of a dozen words gives you a dozen different words.

What this browser version includes

All three lengths, both languages, and your streak, wins and best run stored in your own browser — no account, nothing to install. New word deals a fresh puzzle whenever you want one.

There is no daily challenge here. In the Android app everyone gets the same word on the same date, along with coins, themes and a store; the browser build is the word game on its own. If a browser refuses to store data — a private window, or storage switched off — the page says so plainly rather than silently forgetting your streak.

Common questions