Wend answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (27)

Tiles, words and word lengths, Monday to Sunday

Across the 37 Wend puzzles from 3 September to 10 October 2026 on HintSheet, boards held between 18 and 45 letter tiles, averaging 28.6. Each board's words used every tile exactly once: on every stored board, the word lengths add up to the tile count.

Board size climbed steadily through the week. Monday boards averaged 18.2 tiles; Sunday boards averaged 41.2, more than twice as many. The longest word grew with them, from just over six letters on Mondays to nearly ten at the weekend.

The 18-tile board with one word each of three, four, five and six letters, the layout our Wend guide walks through, turned up five times in the window: four Mondays and #93 on Wednesday 9 September. Every other board was larger, with longer words or more of them.

Most boards hid four words (20 of 37), twelve hid five, three hid six and two hid only three. The two three-word boards were not easy ones: #106 on 22 September used words of six, seven and eight letters, and #116 on 2 October used three eight-letter words.

Across all 164 words in the window, none appeared twice. Lengths spread widely: 11 words of three letters, 19 of four, 26 of five, 27 of six, 28 of seven, 25 of eight, 20 of nine and 8 of ten. Every step from one letter to the next in all 164 paths, 893 steps in total, went up, down, left or right. None was diagonal.

Across the whole window that comes to 1,057 tiles. The most common letter on the boards was E, with 135 appearances, followed by T and A with 87 each. The rarest were Q (5), Z (6) and J (7). All five words containing a Q, from SQUAT to TECHNIQUE, had a U straight after it, so a Q tile tells you the next letter of its word is a U.

Thirty of the 164 words had a doubled letter, as in BALLERINA or GUARANTEE. On a board those two letters sit side by side, so a pair of identical tiles touching each other is worth checking first as part of one word.

Short and long words kept to their own days. Ten of the eleven three-letter words in the window came on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday boards; the exception was DEN on Sunday 20 September (#104). The eight ten-letter words went the other way: three on Saturdays, three on Sundays, one on a Wednesday (ABSOLUTELY, #100) and one on a Friday (TECHNOLOGY, #102). No Monday, Tuesday or Thursday board had a ten-letter word.

The shape of the frame also changed with the day. Every Monday board sat in a 5×5 frame and every Sunday board in a 7×7 one; the single 8×8 frame in the window was the newest Saturday board, #124 on 10 October.

Practising with old Wend boards

Because the answers are words, a finished Wend board spoils itself at a glance: the drawn paths spell them out. The archive works best after you play. Solve the live board, then open its entry here and follow each drawn path to see where the words ran.

The data suggests a few things to watch for. Since no path in the window moved diagonally, you can ignore diagonal neighbours entirely when tracing a word; that alone cuts the candidates around each tile roughly in half. And because every tile is used, a tile with only one neighbouring tile has to be the first or last letter of a word, which makes it a good anchor.

Some boards run one uncommon letter through every word. Every word on #105 (21 September) contains a J, every word on #120 (6 October) an X, every word on #98 (14 September) an H, and every word on #111 (27 September) an M; the three words on #116 (2 October) all contain both B and F. When a rare letter shows up several times on one board, try building each word around one copy of it.

The anchor rule held on every board we checked. Across the window, 49 tiles had only one neighbouring tile, and all 49 were the first or last letter of a word. When you see a tile like that, you know a word starts or stops there before you know what the word is.

Two more habits help on the larger boards. First, use the word lengths: once you have found every word but one, the remaining tiles tell you exactly how long the last word is. Second, solve from the longest word downward. A nine- or ten-letter word takes up a large share of the board, and once it is out, the leftover tiles usually split into short words that are easy to read.

Short words are the other end of the same idea. On the small early-week boards, the three-letter word is easy to overlook because so many three-letter combinations look plausible. Leave it for last: when every other word is found, the three tiles that remain are the answer, whatever they spell.

Finally, keep a note of the words that beat you. No word appeared twice in the window, so the value of the archive is not in memorising answers but in the patterns it shows again and again: a doubled letter, a Q followed by its U, a rare letter shared by every word on the board.

• Warm up on a Monday. Eighteen or nineteen tiles in a 5×5 frame; find the six- or seven-letter word first and the short ones fall out.
• Step up midweek. Thursday boards held 26 to 30 tiles. Aim to find the longest word before the shortest.
• Finish with a weekend board. Saturdays and Sundays averaged close to 40 tiles and a nine- or ten-letter word. Start from the tiles with the fewest neighbours.
• Hunt the shared letter. Before solving, count each letter on the board. If one uncommon letter appears as many times as there are words, assume each word gets one.
• Check yourself against the paths. The month page draws every word's route on the board. If you found a real word the game wouldn't accept, find its tiles on the finished board: they belong to other words, which is the usual reason the game rejects one.

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