Wordle answer, hints and solver — the numbers behind five letters and six guesses

How the colours work — precisely

Green: right letter, right position. Yellow: right letter, wrong position. Grey: the letter is not in the word — *with one exception that catches almost everyone*. If your guess contains a letter twice and the answer contains it once, one tile is coloured and the other is grey. The grey tile does not mean the letter is absent; it means there is no *second* copy. Doubles are the most common reason a solvable puzzle becomes a guess-six.

The answer is always a five-letter word from the Times' curated answer list. Guesses can be any word from the much larger accepted-guess list (about 14,800 words), so you can guess words that will never be answers — which is the basis of every letter-testing strategy.

Which letters matter

Counting letters across the answer list gives an unambiguous ranking. E appears in around 46% of answers, A in about 39%, R in 36%, O in 29%, T in 28%. S is common in the *guess* list but rare in answers because the Times excludes plural -S forms. Position matters too: S is the single most common first letter, E the most common last letter, and A sits in position two far more than anywhere else.

Openers are just applications of that table. A good opener uses five distinct high-frequency letters in their most likely positions. The candidates below are the ones the data keeps producing; the differences between them are small, and consistency beats cleverness.

The second guess is where games are won

After the opener, most players chase a yellow: they move the yellow letter and keep the greens. That is intuitive and usually slow. The faster second guess tests *five new letters* — ignoring what you learned — because guess two exists to shrink the candidate list, not to win. SLATE followed by CRONY (or CORNY) covers ten of the twelve most common letters. By guess three you typically have two or three candidates and can start solving.

The exception is when guess one returns two or more greens. Then the candidate list is already small, and the yellow-chasing instinct is right. The solver on this site makes the distinction for you: it ranks the remaining candidates *and* tells you how many there are, so you can see whether you are in a test-letters or a solve-it situation.

Hard mode, honestly

Hard mode forces every guess to use all revealed hints — greens must stay in place, yellows must be used. It does not make the puzzle harder in the sense of a harder word; it removes the test-five-new-letters strategy. The cost is real on a specific kind of puzzle: the "-IGHT", "-OUND", "-ATCH" families, where a green ending leaves five or six candidates differing in one letter. In normal mode you test those letters in one guess; in hard mode you walk them one at a time and can run out. If your goal is a long streak, play normal mode. If your goal is a lower average, hard mode's discipline does help — the constraint stops you wasting guesses.

The repeated-letter problem, worked

Nearly every guess-six story involves a double letter. Here is why, and what to do.

Suppose the answer is ROBOT and you open with SLATE: every tile grey except the T (yellow). Second guess CRONY: R yellow, O yellow. You now know R, O, T are in the word and not where you put them. The instinct is to try words with one R, one O, one T — TROOP? That has two Os and would show you the double, but most players avoid it because "I already know O is in the word." A guess like TUTOR (two Ts) tests the other double. The efficient third guess is one that *contains a repeated candidate letter* — because if the answer has a double, no single-letter guess will ever tell you.

Rule of thumb: if you have three confirmed letters after two guesses and the remaining candidates don't resolve, the answer probably repeats one of them. Try the repeat on guess three, not guess five.

Wordle beyond English fluency

A third of Wordle's players are not native English speakers, and the game is slightly different for them: the vocabulary is the constraint, not the logic. Two adjustments help. First, use the solver's candidate list as a vocabulary check, not a cheat — if a word ranks first and you don't know it, look it up after the game; the list of five-letter words the Times actually uses is only about 2,300 long and very learnable. Second, favour openers made of letters common in *English* specifically — S, L, T, E, A, R — rather than letters common in your first language; the frequency table on this page is English-only.

The Times' editor has said the answer list avoids words that are obscure to a general American audience, which in practice means British spellings (COLOUR) and regional words are excluded. If a candidate looks British, it isn't the answer.

What the Times changed about the answer list

The original game shipped with a fixed, ordered list of 2,309 answers. When the Times took over it kept most of the list, removed a handful of words it considered obscure or offensive, and then in late 2022 appointed an editor — Tracy Bennett — who now chooses answers by hand rather than following the original order. Practical consequences: answers can now be words that were not on the 2021 list; plural nouns ending in S are still avoided; and the old trick of looking up "the next word in the list" no longer works, which is why every Wordle answer site, this one included, reads the puzzle each day rather than predicting it.

The Times also added WordleBot, an analysis tool for subscribers that scores each guess. Its skill and luck scores are the closest thing to an official measure of a good guess; the solver on HintSheet uses the same underlying idea — rank candidates by how much they split the remaining possibilities.

A note on 'hints' versus 'answer' pages

People arrive at Wordle pages wanting different things at different points in the game. Someone at guess one wants a vowel count. Someone at guess five wants the word. Putting both on one page spoils the first person, which is why HintSheet keeps them apart and stages the hints behind reveals. Nothing on the hints page shows the answer until you ask for it; nothing on the answer page makes you click through.

Wordle myths, checked against the data

Things that get repeated about Wordle and whether the answer list bears them out.

• "The answer is never a plural." Mostly true: plurals with -S are avoided; irregular plurals (GEESE, TEETH) do appear.
• "Words with double letters are rare." About one in five answers has a repeated letter — not rare, just under-guessed.
• "The Times made Wordle harder." The average solve has not moved measurably since the handover; the editor removed a few obscure words and added a few common ones.
• "You should always use the same opener." Consistency helps you read feedback fast; the data says any strong opener is within a few percent of any other, so pick one and stop optimising.
• "Hard mode is for experts." Hard mode is a constraint, not a difficulty setting; it mostly punishes the -IGHT/-OUND families.

What the answers look like across a month

A rough profile of one month of Times-era answers, to set expectations.

Reader questions

"Is the answer the same worldwide?" Yes for a given puzzle number; the date it appears depends on your time zone.

"Can a guess be a proper noun?" No — the guess list excludes them.

"What was the first Wordle answer?" CIGAR, on 19 June 2021.

Glossary

Terms as used on this site.

• Opener — your first guess.
• Candidate — a word still consistent with all feedback.
• Test word — a guess chosen to eliminate letters rather than to be the answer.
• Hard mode — revealed hints must be used.

A weekly rhythm

Wordle has no difficulty curve by design, but the editor does avoid running two hard words in a row, and the week's variance comes from letter patterns rather than rarity. Statistically, the guess-six days cluster around repeated letters and the -IGHT/-OUND/-ATCH families; the guess-two days are common words with an S or T in first position. Neither is scheduled.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Wordle answers

• Sep 2, 2026 · #814 — 5 letters · starts with R
• Sep 1, 2026 · #4774 — 5 letters · starts with R

Browse the full Wordle archive or go back to today's puzzle answers across every game on HintSheet.