How SIXY chooses its words

A fixed schedule of 3,000 answers

SIXY has a calendar-based schedule containing 3,000 unique six-letter answers. A scheduled answer is used once, so the game can run for more than eight years without repeating a daily solution. Everyone playing the same puzzle number receives the same answer, while the day changes at local midnight.

Once a puzzle has appeared, it stays fixed. We do not replace a completed answer or rewrite a player’s history when later improvements are made to the future schedule.

Answers are curated more tightly than guesses

A word can be valid language without being ideal as a daily answer. The answer schedule favors recognizable words that create a satisfying deduction. The accepted-guess dictionary is broader because players should be able to test a legitimate six-letter word even when it would be too rare, specialized, or awkward for a scheduled solution.

This distinction prevents a reasonable exploratory guess from being rejected while allowing the daily answer list to maintain a more consistent level of familiarity.

Variety across the calendar

A long answer list can still feel repetitive if similar forms land close together. We review the calendar for clusters of endings and grammatical patterns. Most simple plurals or present-tense forms ending in S and most past-tense forms ending in ED are kept out of future answers, though they can remain valid guesses.

Words ending in ING are also distributed with at least ten games between them after the opening puzzles. This keeps the daily rhythm varied without deleting useful words from the collection.

Repeated letters are welcome

Answers with repeated letters are an important part of SIXY because they make the pink quantity clue meaningful. We include single and repeated-letter patterns across vowels and consonants, while avoiding a schedule that leans too heavily on one construction.

The clue is computed from the exact answer and the submitted guess. Pink appears only when the answer requires more copies than the guess currently contains; the +1 or +2 badge reports the remaining quantity.

What we review

• Whether the word is six letters and suitable for ordinary English-language play.
• Whether it is recognizable enough to feel fair as an answer.
• Whether its spelling, variant, or specialized use could create unnecessary ambiguity.
• Whether nearby answers already use a similar ending or grammatical form.
• Whether the word creates an interesting mix of letters and positions.

No dictionary is perfect. Language changes, regional variants differ, and a valid word may be missing from the guess list. We review player reports rather than automatically placing every reported word into the answer schedule.

Report a word

If SIXY rejects a legitimate six-letter guess, or if a daily answer feels unusually obscure or ambiguous, tell us what happened through the contact page. Include the word and puzzle number, but avoid posting an active answer publicly before the day ends.