about hoolah
hoolah is a phonetic spelling of hula, the Tagalog word for to guess. International players who already know hula as the Hawaiian dance get a second meaning for free. Filipino speakers should hear the homophone the first time they read the name. Either way, you are here to guess.
The rules are the rules. Five letters, six tries, one new word every midnight in Manila time. Wordle did the work of teaching the world this shape; the contribution here is the vocabulary.
why a Tagalog word game
There are over eighty million Tagalog speakers, and the New York Times Wordle has been ported into dozens of languages. A daily Filipino edition is one of the obvious gaps. The point is small but worth saying: the words you grow up reading and writing should be allowed to be entertainment, not only homework.
the word list
v1 ships 154 daily-answer words and 425 extra accepted guesses, all hand-curated. No corpus extraction, no scraped dictionary. The source is one Filipino speaker (the author) writing words she actually uses, checked against the orthography rule and the dictionaries she keeps for her linguistics work. A short list you can defend end-to-end beats a long list with inventions buried inside it.
The full provenance — where each word came from, what criteria it had to meet, what the list is explicitly not, and how to suggest a missing word — lives in docs/CORPUS.md. Read it before opening an issue.
The acceptable-guess list is broader than the daily-answer set. Naturalised loanwords from Spanish (kotse, plato, papel, karne) are accepted; recent English loans that have not naturalised are not. The alphabet is the 26-letter modern Filipino set; no ñ, no diacritics on tiles. A later release may add a diacritic-aware mode.
Suggestions for additions, removals, or corrections go to the GitHub issue tracker. Please cite a source.
how the daily word gets picked
The puzzle number is the count of days since 1 June 2026, the day this site launched. The word for a given puzzle number is selected by a stable hash of that number into the answer array, so day 42 is the same word for every player on every device. Computation happens in the browser; the site does not need a server to know what today is.
what is not here
No accounts. No leaderboards. No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts at all. Your streak and your stats live in your browser's localStorage and stay there. There is no email collection, no notification permission prompt, no ad server. If you want a daily reminder, install the site as a PWA on your phone (Share, then Add to Home Screen) and treat it like any other app.
who made it
hoolah is built and maintained by Angelica Naguio. Her published work on Filipino morphology — Comparative Analysis of Tagalog Stemmers (PACLIC 38, Tokyo) — is the reason she cared about a clean five-letter Tagalog dataset enough to type one out by hand. The codebase is MIT-licensed and lives at github.com/fish-and-bear/hoolah.
A note on the name: there is a dormant Singapore-based buy-now-pay-later brand also called Hoolah, acquired by ShopBack in 2021. No confusion expected with a Filipino word game; raised and decided.