A bit late to the discussion, but I think the game shows promise and could perhaps end up being a commute-distraction for me in daily life.

I think you should consider taking a page out of the book of Wordle and threemagicwords.app and at least mark correctly placed letters, even though the entire word is not yet correct. That would provide some kind of incremental progress, eg in the situation where I'm trying to guess "*ea*", which has the possibility of being tear, fear, teat, rear, read, lead, mead etc etc. As long as a correct dictionary word is provided, the user should receive some kind of reward.