It’s time for your guide to today’s Wordle answer, featuring my commentary on the latest puzzle, plus a selection of hints designed to help you keep your streak going.
Don’t think you need any clues for Wordle today? No problem, just skip to my daily column. But remember: failure in this game is only ever six guesses away.
Want more word-based fun? My Quordle today page contains hints and answers for that game, and you can also take a look at my NYT Strands today and NYT Connections today pages for my verdict on two of the New York Times’ other brainteasers.
SPOILER WARNING: Today’s Wordle answer and hints are below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to see them.
Wordle hints (game #1226) – clue #1 – Vowels
How many vowels does today’s Wordle have?
• Wordle today has a vowel in one place*.
* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).
Wordle hints (game #1226) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is S.
S is the most common starting letter in the game, featuring in 365 of Wordle’s 2,309 answers. In fact, it’s almost twice as likely to begin an answer as the next most common starting letter, C.
Wordle hints (game #1226) – clue #3 – repeated letters
Does today’s Wordle have any repeated letters?
• There are no repeated letters in today’s Wordle.
Repeated letters are quite common in the game, with 748 of the 2,309 Wordle answers containing one. However, it’s still more likely that a Wordle doesn’t have one.
Wordle hints (game #1226) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is Y.
Y is the second most common ending letter in the game, behind only E. In total, 364 Wordle answers end with a Y.
Wordle hints (game #1226) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #1226.
- Today’s Wordle answer is covered in a layer of loose, granular material.
If you just want to know today’s Wordle answer now, simply scroll down – but I’d always recommend trying to solve it on your own first. We’ve got lots of Wordle tips and tricks to help you, including a guide to the best Wordle start words.
If you don’t want to know today’s answer then DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER BECAUSE IT IS PRINTED BELOW. So don’t say you weren’t warned!
Today’s Wordle answer (game #1226)
- NYT average score: 3.7
- My score: 3
- WordleBot’s score: 4
- Best start word performance*: SANER (1 remaining answer)
- My start word performance: AUNTY (16)
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Today’s Wordle answer (game #1226) is… SANDY.
This is theoretically the easiest Wordle we’ve had for nearly a week, when SHOUT (3.6) followed SPOON (3.7) last Monday and Tuesday. Like those two words it begins with an S, the most common of all starting letters and one that is included in many a popular start word.
That’s evident in the results for those words today: SLATE left 22, STARE left 24 and SAINT cut the options to only three. Best of all was SANER, which would have guaranteed a solve in two for anyone who began with it.
I wasn’t one of them, but I had some luck with my opening guess anyway. My starter today – chosen at random, as always – was AUNTY, and that gave me a green N and Y, plus a yellow A. That was a nice surprise after my disastrous beginning yesterday, where I had 904 options; here, I had a shortlist of only 16. Or that’s what WordleBot said, at least; I didn’t find nearly that many, but came up with 10: FANCY, CANNY, CANDY, BANDY, MANLY, MANGY, SANDY, DANDY, RANGY and RANDY.
The fact that I missed six, including some fairly obvious ones such as HANKY and HANDY, explains why the ‘bot only awarded me a skill score of 79 for my second guess, DRUMS, and described it as “lucky”. In my head, it would have left me a couple of 50/50s, but nothing worse. In the ‘bot’s, it could have left a seven-way face-off including a couple of mine and five of those I didn’t spot.
In my defence, it’s very hard to find every possible answer at this stage of the game. I didn’t have the advantage of knowing exactly how many there were, and unfortunately I can’t spend hours every game searching for them all, much as I’d like to. My shortlist contained enough words for me to have a good stab at the answer, and indeed at finding a word that would narrow them down.
And that’s what it did: DRUMS gave me a yellow D at the start and yellow S at the end, which together with the N, Y and A I already had meant the solution had to be SANDY. What’s more, WordleBot could only only score a four, so I had the last laugh, lucky though I may have been. No, I’m not petty at all…
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #1225)
In a different time zone where it’s still Saturday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #1225, too.
- Wordle yesterday had vowels in two places.
* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).
- The first letter in yesterday’s Wordle answer was W.
W is a fairly average letter when it comes to starting an answer. There are 82 solutions that begin with a W, with means that it ranks 13th – so right in the middle of the alphabet.
- There were no repeated letters in yesterday’s Wordle.
Repeated letters are quite common in the game, with 748 of the 2,309 Wordle answers containing one. However, it’s still more likely that a Wordle doesn’t have one.
- The last letter in yesterday’s Wordle was K.
K is much more common at the end of a Wordle answer than at the start, and in fact ranks ninth overall in this regard.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #1225.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is to bring about or inflict punishment.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1225)
- NYT average score: 4.9
- My score: 6
- WordleBot’s score: 4
- Best start word performance*: TRADE (8 remaining answers)
- My start word performance: BOUND (904)
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1225) was… WREAK.
As with Friday’s difficult FROWN, this is a Wordle which suffers from having too many possible answers. And the average reflects that: WordleBot says it’s currently being solved in a mighty 4.9 guesses, which would make it harder than FROWN (4.4), harder than GOOFY (4.6) and only a little behind FIBER (5.0). Admittedly, it’s still a ways off CORER at 5.7, but then so is almost every answer ever.
I suspect the average may go down a little because, at the time that I wrote this, it was still very early in the day and not many people would have played. But equally, I’m not surprised to see it well above the 4.0 level. That’s mostly due to the fact that FREAK, CREAK and BREAK were all alternative answers, and in fact all were more obvious as words and had a more common starting letter than the decidedly uncommon W.
To further complicate matters, -REA- as a combination in the center is the equal most likely, with 11 solutions; others include BREAD, GREAT, CREAM and TREAD, so there are some obvious choices there.
I had to settle for a six, disappointingly, but my streak was never in doubt and I don’t think there was much I could have done differently. Well, besides guess correctly of course. But my choices were all reasonably logical, and Wordlebot awarded me a skill score of 92, so it was far from a disaster. I’ve played a lot more poorly and scored far higher in the past.
Things began very badly, with BOUND – which could be an excellent starting word on some days – leaving me a gargantuan 904 possible solutions. Interestingly, there were some real successes on this front today, with CRANE cutting the options to 11 and CRATE at eight. The fact that the average is as high as this (assuming it stays there) shows how tricky it is, given that CRANE in particular will probably have brought down the average.
I played it safe on the second guess, going with STARE – my former start word of choice and one which today gave me those all-important A, R and E letters. Unfortunately, they were all yellow and I still had 40 words to choose from.
Many of those were ER words, and I duly focused my attention on that possibility, playing RAVER next. This was designed to rule in/out words such as RACER, RARER and CARER, as well as establishing the ER format – but I was barking up the wrong tree. WordleBot didn’t like it much, stating that “this guess wasn’t my favorite”, but it cut my options to six while the ‘bot’s choice of CAMPY would have left five, so its criticism seems rather harsh.
RAVER still left me three yellows, but the places where they could now be played were few and far between, and I was able to find five of the six words: FREAK, CREAK, WREAK, FERAL and CREAM; the ‘bot also had CREMA.
The obvious thing to do next was to establish if it was the -REAK format or if CREAM might be the answer (I knew FERAL had been a past Wordle answer – game #1,137 not that long ago). With that in mind, I played CREAK – which WordleBot said was a “great choice” but as it turned out, CREAK had been an answer too – game #347, ages ago. I didn’t recall it, though, so was left with a 50/50 between FREAK and WREAK. I guessed the more common word first and was wrong, so had to settle for a six.
Wordle answers: The past 50
I’ve been playing Wordle every day for more than two years now and have tracked all of the previous answers so I can help you improve your game. Here are the last 50 solutions starting with yesterday’s answer, or check out my past Wordle answers page for the full list.
- Wordle #1225, Saturday 26 October: WREAK
- Wordle #1224, Friday 25 October: FROWN
- Wordle #1223, Thursday 24 October: BOSSY
- Wordle #1222, Wednesday 23 October: GOOFY
- Wordle #1221, Tuesday 22 October: SHOUT
- Wordle #1220, Monday 21 October: SPOON
- Wordle #1219, Sunday 20 October: DICEY
- Wordle #1218, Saturday 19 October: FIBER
- Wordle #1217, Friday 18 October: STINT
- Wordle #1216, Thursday 17 October: HALVE
- Wordle #1215, Wednesday 16 October: GRANT
- Wordle #1214, Tuesday 15 October: CORER
- Wordle #1213, Monday 14 October: GAMUT
- Wordle #1212, Sunday 13 October: PRONE
- Wordle #1211, Saturday 12 October: STAIN
- Wordle #1210, Friday 11 October: GUSTY
- Wordle #1209, Thursday 10 October: CARVE
- Wordle #1208, Wednesday 9 October: MOMMY
- Wordle #1207, Tuesday 8 October: JOINT
- Wordle #1206, Monday 7 October: FLOUR
- Wordle #1205, Sunday 6 October: LAGER
- Wordle #1204, Saturday 5 October: MINER
- Wordle #1203, Friday 4 October: TITLE
- Wordle #1202, Thursday 3 October: WAGON
- Wordle #1201, Wednesday 2 October: SHELL
- Wordle #1200, Tuesday 1 October: MODEM
- Wordle #1199, Monday 30 September: CLOUD
- Wordle #1198, Sunday 29 September: RIDER
- Wordle #1197, Saturday 28 September: BRAIN
- Wordle #1196, Friday 27 September: FAITH
- Wordle #1195, Thursday 26 September: THANK
- Wordle #1194, Wednesday 25 September: TORCH
- Wordle #1193, Tuesday 24 September: HANDY
- Wordle #1192, Monday 23 September: STEAM
- Wordle #1191, Sunday 22 September: TEACH
- Wordle #1190, Saturday 21 September: SEVEN
- Wordle #1189, Friday 20 September: SMOKE
- Wordle #1188, Thursday 19 September: PRESS
- Wordle #1187, Wednesday 18 September: FULLY
- Wordle #1186, Tuesday 17 September: BEAUT
- Wordle #1185, Monday 16 September: HONEY
- Wordle #1184, Sunday 15 September: RECUR
- Wordle #1183, Saturday 14 September: BROAD
- Wordle #1182, Friday 13 September: HARSH
- Wordle #1181, Thursday 12 September: BRASS
- Wordle #1180, Wednesday 11 September: AISLE
- Wordle #1179, Tuesday 10 September: REBEL
- Wordle #1178, Monday 9 September: DEBIT
- Wordle #1177, Sunday 8 September: DRAWN
- Wordle #1176, Saturday 7 September: OWNER
What is Wordle?
If you’re on this page then you almost certainly know what Wordle is already, and indeed have probably been playing it for a while. And even if you’ve not been playing it, you must surely have heard of it by now, because it’s the viral word game phenomenon that took the world by storm last year and is still going strong in 2024.
We’ve got a full guide to the game in our What is Wordle page, but if you just want a refresher then here are the basics.
What is Wordle?
Wordle challenges you to guess a new five-letter word each day. You get six guesses, with each one revealing a little more information. If one of the letters in your guess is in the answer and in the right place, it turns green. If it’s in the answer but in the wrong place, it turns yellow. And if it’s not in the answer at all it turns gray. Simple, eh?
It’s played online via the Wordle website or the New York Times’ Crossword app (iOS / Android), and is entirely free.
Crucially, the answer is the same for everyone each day, meaning that you’re competing against the rest of the world, rather than just against yourself or the game. The puzzle then resets each day at midnight in your local time, giving you a new challenge, and the chance to extend your streak.
What are the Wordle rules?
The rules of Wordle are pretty straightforward, but with a couple of curveballs thrown in for good measure.
1. Letters that are in the answer and in the right place turn green.
2. Letters that are in the answer but in the wrong place turn yellow.
3. Letters that are not in the answer turn gray.
4. Answers are never plural.
5. Letters can appear more than once. So if your guess includes two of one letter, they may both turn yellow, both turn green, or one could be yellow and the other green.
6. Each guess must be a valid word in Wordle’s dictionary. You can’t guess ABCDE, for instance.
7. You do not have to include correct letters in subsequent guesses unless you play on Hard mode.
8. You have six guesses to solve the Wordle.
9. You must complete the daily Wordle before midnight in your timezone.
10. All answers are drawn from Wordle’s list of 2,309 solutions. However…
11. Wordle will accept a wider pool of words as guesses – some 10,000 of them. For instance, you can guess a plural such as WORDS. It definitely won’t be right (see point 4 above), but Wordle will accept it as a guess.