Worldle tips: reading its three clues

The distance is measured between centres

Worldle's distance runs from the middle of the country you guessed to the middle of the answer, not from border to border. The FAQ's own example is the United States and Canada, which share a long border yet come out about 2,260 km apart by this measure. A neighbour can therefore look a long way off, and a large number on its own does not mean you are on the wrong continent.

The FAQ adds that the distance tells you something about size. If you guess a country next door and still see a big figure, the two centres must be far apart, which means at least one of the two countries is large; if your guess was small, the answer is probably the big one. Kilometres and miles can be switched in Settings.

The arrow shows only eight directions

The arrow points from your guess toward the answer. Underneath, the game works out a bearing on a sixteen-point compass, but it has just eight arrows to draw, so north-north-east, north-east and east-north-east all appear as the same diagonal. The FAQ warns that the arrow may not point in exactly the right direction for this reason.

That makes a straight arrow, up, down or sideways, the sharper clue, while a diagonal covers a wide wedge on either side of it. The FAQ also says Worldle never sends you in odd directions such as over the North or South Pole, so read the arrow as an ordinary compass heading on a flat world map, not as the shortest route around the globe.

What the percentage and the squares mean

The proximity percentage puts the same distance on a fixed scale. In the game's code it is the share of 20,000 km, roughly half the way around the Earth, left over once your distance is taken away, rounded down and never below zero. In the FAQ's words, 0% means you guessed the opposite side of the world and 100% means you found the country.

• Every percentage point stands for about 200 km.
• At 50% the two centres are roughly 10,000 km apart.
• At 90% the centre of the answer lies within about 2,000 km of the centre of your guess; at 95%, within about 1,000 km.
• The share grid rounds your figure down to the nearest 10 and draws it as five squares, where green counts for 20% and yellow for 10%: the FAQ's example of 72% shows three green, one yellow and one black.
• A setting replaces proximity with a size percentage that compares the land areas of your guess and the answer, handy when you know the region but not how big the country is.

How the daily answer is picked

Answers come from the ISO 3166-1 list, so places some people think of as countries, such as Scotland, Puerto Rico and Hong Kong, are not accepted, and a few names are simplified. Choose names from the list as you type rather than trusting your own spelling. The daily pick itself is random, within a few rules the FAQ describes.

• No country comes back within 100 days, so an answer from the last three months or so is ruled out.
• Countries smaller than 5,000 km² do not repeat within seven days.
• Two days in a row are never both in Africa, or both in Asia: after an African answer, today's lies somewhere else.
• The outline has no scale, so a tiny island can fill the frame as fully as a huge country. If you are thinking small and getting nowhere, the FAQ suggests thinking big.
• Settings can make it harder: hide the outline and play from the clues alone, or rotate it at random so its familiar angle gives nothing away.

Practise between puzzles

The FAQ's own advice for getting better is to study outlines, particularly coastlines, island chains and unusual shapes, to look at a world map often, to use flashcards, to keep scale in mind and, above all, to use Worldle's Practice Mode, which matches countries with their maps, flags, languages and more. Each free game below trains one piece of that.