Wordle Answer Today (October 19, 2026)

Today's word, and the page around it

The answer sits at the top in its five tiles, with a letter breakdown beneath — how many vowels, whether a letter repeats, where it starts and ends — and a short note generated from the word. That is the daily part. Everything below is the standing guide to Wordle: how the game and its word lists behave, why some days take six guesses, and the handful of habits that make the difference. If you want to be nudged rather than told, the Wordle hints page reveals the same information one clue at a time.

Wordle is the game every daily-puzzle site is measured against. Six guesses to find a five-letter word; grey, yellow and green tiles after each guess telling you which letters are absent, present-but-misplaced, and correctly placed. It has been owned by the New York Times since January 2022, it is numbered from 19 June 2021 (NYT's data counts 11 October 2026 as Wordle 1,940), and like the other Times word games it loads the puzzle for your device's date, so it changes at your local midnight. This page publishes each date's word at midnight Eastern and says so in the date.

What decides how hard a day is

Wordle difficulty comes from the word, not the player, and the answer lists show four things that make a word hard:

• Repeated letters. 747 of the 2,309 original answers repeat a letter, and 10 of the 41 answers from September and early October 2026 did — and a double letter is invisible until you test for it: a yellow E tells you there is an E, not that there is only one.
• Letters few openers test. A word like NYMPH or DRYLY (an answer on 10 September 2026) has no A, E, I, O or U, and most opening guesses are built around vowels.
• Common endings with many candidates. The original list has nine answers ending -IGHT, eight ending -OUND and seven ending -ATCH, and hard mode forbids the probe that would split them.
• Words outside the old list. 15 of the 41 recent answers, from REMIX to UNCAP, were not on the original 2,309-word list, so players who learned that list have no head start on them.

Opening, second guess, and the trap on guess four

The opening word matters less than people argue about it and more than "any word will do". Measured over the original answer list in NYT's game code, strong openers such as ROATE, RAISE, SLATE, TRACE and CRANE leave between 60 and 79 answers on average after the first guess, while ADIEU leaves 123 and AUDIO 183. What the strong ones share is five distinct common letters in common positions. The second guess is where averages are made: after a mostly grey opener, a second word with five more common letters — SLATE then CRONY, TRACE then LIONS — takes the list to about five answers on average.

The trap is guess four with three or four candidates that differ by one letter. In normal mode the efficient move is a word that tests the differing letters even if it cannot be the answer. In hard mode that move is illegal, and the honest advice is to guess the most common candidate and accept the odds. The Wordle solver counts the candidates left at exactly this moment, and the Wordle guide works through the reasoning with examples.

The word list, and the Times' hand on it

Wordle has two lists, and both ship in the game's code: 14,855 words the game accepts as guesses, and the original 2,309-word answer list that starts with CIGAR. Since November 2022 an editor, Tracy Bennett, has chosen each day's word, and in the 41 answers from 1 September to 11 October 2026 15 came from outside the original list. Past answers are listed in this site's Wordle archive; none of the 41 answers in that window repeated another.

Regular plurals ending in S are not used as answers, though they are accepted as guesses: only 36 of the 2,309 original answers end in S, and they are words like FOCUS, BONUS and GLASS, while verb forms and irregular plurals such as GEESE do appear. Wikipedia notes that Wordle follows American spelling and that the Times removed British variants such as FIBRE from the answer list.

About the answer shown here

The word is captured from the Times' own puzzle data and published at midnight Eastern by the pipeline on the editorial policy page — and the days ahead that the Times serves are held back and released on their dates, never early, so this page never shows tomorrow. The letter analysis is computed from the word, and the note on the day is generated from it too. If your Wordle has not yet changed because your own midnight has not arrived, compare the word's number in your game: the Times numbers each puzzle by days since 19 June 2021.

Reading the letter breakdown

The breakdown beneath the tiles gives facts about the word — vowel count, repeated letters, first and last letters — and each maps to a habit. Vowel count matters because two vowels is the common case (57.9% of the original list) and a one-vowel or no-vowel word breaks the usual opening assumptions; the count is worth checking against your guesses to see whether your opener would have caught it. The repeated-letter row is the day's most useful fact, because a third of the original answers repeat a letter and a double is invisible until you test for it. First and last letters tell you whether the word was one your opening pattern favoured — S starts 15.8% of the original answers and E ends 18.3% — and a word that starts with an unusual letter is a legitimately hard day.

The puzzle number in the table is the Wordle number shown in the game and its share text: the days since 19 June 2021, which the Times' own puzzle data also carries.

Six-guess days, and whether they are your fault

Some days are lost by play and some by the word. A repeated letter that your guesses never tested, an ending with nine candidates in hard mode, a word from outside the list you know — these produce six-guess days for good players. What habits do prevent is the other kind: five candidates left on guess four and a guess that tests only one of them; a yellow letter tried in the same position twice; a grey letter reused. The letter breakdown at the top says which features today's word had, and the archive of past answers lets you check a run of hard days against the same question: was it the word, or the play?

A note on streaks

Wordle keeps a streak and a guess distribution, and both follow you across devices only if you are signed in to a New York Times account; Wikipedia notes that the Times introduced account logins to track stats after the takeover, and synced progress across mobile and desktop from August 2022. The distribution is the more honest statistic: a player whose chart peaks at four with a long tail into six is losing guesses in the middle game, which is where the second-guess advice above applies; a player whose chart peaks at three with a few sixes is being beaten by repeated letters and crowded endings. The Wordle guide covers both, and the archive lets you check which past words were the sixes.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Wordle answers

Every past puzzle is in the Wordle archive. New here? Start with the Wordle guide.