Wordle Answer Yesterday (October 19, 2026)

Why yesterday is a different question from today

Someone looking up the current word is usually mid-game and wants as little help as possible, which is why the Wordle hint page reveals one stage at a time. Someone looking up the previous word has normally finished, given up, or missed the day. What they want is the answer stated plainly, and a reliable number to go with it.

A second group is checking a disagreement. Two friends comparing notes can easily be talking about different puzzles, because Wordle loads the puzzle for the date on your own device. When it is already tomorrow for one of them, their "yesterday" is the other person's "today".

The third group has a number and no word. Wordle's public number counts the days since the game launched on 19 June 2021 — it is the days_since_launch value in the Times' own data — so the previous puzzle's number is always exactly one below the current one. On HintSheet, 19 October 2026 was No. 1948 (STINK) and 20 October 2026 was No. 1949 (WREST).

Whichever group you are in, the layout is the same: the date and number first, then the word, then a link to the current puzzle. Nothing above the word needs to be scrolled past, and nothing below it changes what the word was.

Yesterday's word against today's

Does the previous answer tell you anything about the next one? We checked every pair of consecutive days in our archive. The answer is: very little. No two neighbouring words shared more than three distinct letters, and a third of the pairs shared none at all — JOIST followed RULER, WAGER followed JOIST, and SOUPY followed WAGER on three straight days in early September.

Only three times in the window did consecutive answers start with the same letter, and all fifty answers were different words. Treat the previous word as a record, not a clue; if you want a better opener, the best starting words guide is the place for that, not yesterday's answer.

Midnight where you are, midnight where we are

Wordle changes at your local midnight, because the game asks your device what day it is. HintSheet cannot know your time zone in advance, so it publishes each date's word at midnight Eastern time and labels every page with the date it covers.

That creates a three-hour window worth knowing about if you play on the US West Coast. From 9 p.m. Pacific, our current page has already moved to the next date, so the puzzle shown here as the previous one is the puzzle still live on your device until your own midnight. Read the date printed at the top before you scroll if you have not finished. Players ahead of Eastern time see the opposite effect: their new puzzle arrives a few hours before our pages turn over.

If you play on more than one device, the same logic applies to each of them: a phone left on a different time zone after travel will happily serve a different puzzle from your laptop until both agree on the date.

Checking your own grid against the answer

Once you know the word, your shared grid becomes a record you can read row by row. Write the answer above it and go guess by guess: every green tile should sit on a letter the answer has in that exact position, every yellow on a letter it has somewhere else, and every grey on a letter it doesn't have at all. If a row fits that pattern, the colours were right and the question is only what the next guess could have used better.

Repeated letters are where rows most often stop making sense on a second look. Wordle colours a repeated letter in your guess according to how many times it really appears, so a guess with two of a letter can show one coloured tile and one grey even though the letter is in the word. Reading your rows against the answer, with that rule in mind, usually shows which guess carried the most information and which one repeated what you already knew.

It is also the quickest way to see where a guess ignored something an earlier row had already shown — a letter tried again after it came back grey, or a green letter moved out of its spot. Those are the habits worth changing before the next puzzle, and they are much easier to spot when the answer is no longer a secret.

Hard mode: why a lost day often looks obvious afterwards

Wordle's settings describe Hard Mode in one line: "Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses." That rule explains most of the hard-mode losses people come to check. Once a guess has turned four letters green, every later guess has to keep them, so each row can test only one new letter in the open slot.

Look at the Wordle answer yesterday with that in mind. If it belonged to a family of words that differ by a single letter — the kind where _ATCH or _IGHT has half a dozen real endings — then a hard-mode loss was close to arithmetic rather than bad luck: six rows cannot always cover seven candidates when each row may only try one.

In normal mode the escape is a throwaway guess that tests several of the candidate letters at once. Hard mode forbids exactly that, which is why its losses tend to cluster on these word families.

Four reasons to look at the previous word

Most visits to this page fall into one of these, and the page is laid out with them in mind:

• You missed the day. The word, the number and the date are at the top, so there is nothing to click through.
• You lost on row six and the reveal disappeared before you took it in. The word is printed in full above, with its date and number.
• Someone quoted a number. The previous puzzle is one below the current one; for anything older, the Wordle archive lists every date with its number.
• You are building a practice list. Looking back over a run of real answers is a good way to notice how often a word ends in Y or opens with S, which our archive page tallies.

Older than yesterday

Every word HintSheet has published stays in the Wordle archive, newest first, and each day links to a full answer page. When you are looking for a specific date, start there rather than paging back one day at a time from here.

The Times also lists a "Wordle Archive" in the game's own menu, at nytimes.com/games/wordle/archive, where earlier puzzles can be played rather than just read. Whether it opens for you depends on your account: the Times promotes its archives as a subscriber benefit, with the line "Access over 10,000 puzzles in our archives. Subscribe now." Our pages show answers only and need no account.

Each date in our archive also has a page of its own, with buttons to step to the day before and the day after, so you can walk backwards through a week of answers from wherever you land. The Wordle answer yesterday on this page is simply the newest of those dated records, shown at a fixed address so it is easy to bookmark.

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