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, which remains the best of all the main Wordle alternatives.
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 #963) – clue #1 – Vowels
How many vowels does today’s Wordle have?
• Wordle today has 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).
Wordle hints (game #963) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is A.
A is a reasonably common starting letter in Wordle: 140 games begin with this letter. It ranks 6th among starting letters, behind S, C, B, T and P.
Wordle hints (game #963) – 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 #963) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is R.
R is a very common letter to end a Wordle answer – it’s actually the 4th most common there, behind E, Y and T.
Wordle hints (game #963) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #963.
- Today’s Wordle answer is following this.
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 #963)
Today’s Wordle answer (game #963) is… AFTER.
Another day, another very common word. That was also the situation with yesterday’s WHICH (see below), but this one might have been a little easier to solve. Unlike that word, AFTER doesn’t have any repeated letters, or even any really uncommon ones. F is the closest it comes on that front; that’s only the 19th in the overall rankings.
It is, however, an ER word. But before you run for the hills, fear not – because it’s not one of the difficult ones. And that’s all because it starts with a vowel.
Let me explain. By my reckoning, there have been exactly 50 ER answers so far. I have WordleBot scores for 35 of these, and they have an average of just under 4.4 overall. So far, so simple.
These ER words break down into two groups: those that have a format of consonant-vowel-consonant-E-R (JOKER, GAMER) and those that go vowel-consonant-consonant-E-R (ALTER, OLDER). And if you compare the scores for those groups, there’s a clear pattern. Yes, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the vowel-starting ones have a much lower average score – 4.0 compared to nearly 4.6 for the other group.
If you’re wondering why that might be, my guess is that it’s because most of the best Wordle starting words include multiple vowels. If you start with TRACE or CRANE or STARE, you have an A in the middle. If the answer is something like GAMER or HATER, and you turn that yellow A green on the second or third go, you will have narrowed down the options by a decent amount. But if the answer is ALTER or AFTER, and you turn that A green at the start of the word, you’ll have drastically reduced the number of possible answers. And that’s because there are far more ER words that contain an A in the middle than there are those that include an A at the beginning. Ditto for I, O or U.
I may well be completely wrong about all of this, of course, but it makes sense to me. And indeed, TRACE only left 15 answers today, CRATE was at 21 and STARE at 20. Better still were CARET at two and TASER at only two.
The upshot is that this isn’t as difficult as you might expect – or at least that it doesn’t have as high an average score. WordleBot says it’s at 3.7, which is not too bad in the context of other recent games.
My opening word today was ENVOY, which is a decent start word in general but not a very lucky one today, in that it left 787 possible answers. Oh dear. With a result as poor as that, I had no choice but to go big with the second guess, so I chose TRACE, the best starter of them all.
This worked really well, giving me three more yellow letters and cutting my options to 11. Almost all of them were ER words; I had WATER, HATER, DATER, RATER, AFTER, LATER and ALTER, although I recalled that HATER had been a past Wordle answer. I also had ALERT but missed ASTER, RETAG and RATED. (I’m not sure about the last one, personally, because I don’t think Wordle uses ED answers.)
Based on the words I’d found, I went with ALTER – having completely forgotten that it was another past answer (from January 2023). That was a little annoying, but it did the job well enough, leaving me with only AFTER and ASTER. Given that I hadn’t even thought of the latter, I went with the former and scored a satisfactory 4.0.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #962)
In a different time zone where it’s still Tuesday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #962, too.
- Wordle yesterday had 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).
- 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 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 H.
H is a regular visitor to the final spot in a Wordle word. It occurs 137 times at the end of a Wordle answer, making it the sixth most common letter there.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #962.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is what one of these?
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #962)
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #962) was… WHICH.
Did you enjoy this one? I certainly didn’t. From a terrible start word to a heap of bad luck in the middle and then a poor choice at the end, I struggled throughout.
The frustrating thing is that WHICH is one of the most common words ever to be an answer in the game; according to WordAndPhraseInfo.com, a site which records how widely used a word is, it ranks 58th. And among Wordle answers, I think that means only THEIR (36th), WOULD (41st), ABOUT (46th) and THERE (53rd) are more common.
But common or not, this is a potentially difficult one for several reasons. For a start, it contains two Hs, one of only 10 games to do so. HATCH (game #113) and HUTCH (#376) are previous examples. What’s more, it also contains a W; this is the sixth least common letter, ahead of only V, Z, X, Q and J.
Very few of the best Wordle starting words helped much, either, which is not so surprising give that WHICH doesn’t contain an E, S, L, A, T or R, letters which feature in most of them. TRACE, WordleBot’s favorite, left 43 options because it does contain a C, but the likes of SLATE (314) and STARE (321) were a long way off. Only one of the top 20 made any real inroads; SLICE cut the options to 10, while TRICE (just outside the top 20) left eight.
Those three factors are enough to lift it above many Wordles, and I suspect that it’s only the commonality of WHICH that has kept it below 4.0; WordleBot says its average score is 3.9.
My opener was close to useless. My random word generator gave me JIFFY, which pairs the least common letter in the game, J, with a repeated F. Not good. Fortunately, it did have an I, so the number of options left to me were, um, merely 462.
I decided to right those wrongs by playing STILE, which added three very common consonants plus E. But I had terrible luck, with none of the new letters changing color, although the I did go green.
I still had 48 options left, WordleBot said later, but all I knew at this time was that I was a long way away from solving it. Things seemingly didn’t get any better with my third guess, PRONG, which gave me no new letters at all.
So here I was, about to take my fourth guess and still with only one uncovered letter – despite now having played 13 of them. Amazingly, WordleBot said I now only had five words left to me, but I didn’t know that at the time and could only find four: CHICK, WHIZZ, WHICH and QUICK.
If I’d have known that there was only one more, HAIKU, to be discovered, I’d have guessed one of my quartet – because any of them would have ruled out the others. Indeed, WordleBot chastised me for not doing so.
However, I thought there might be others out there, so played WHACK in order to narrow things down some more. The upshot was that I eventually scraped home with a 5/6. And no, I did not enjoy a bit of it.
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 #962, Tuesday 6 February: WHICH
- Wordle #961, Monday 5 February: REPEL
- Wordle #960, Sunday 4 February: VERGE
- Wordle #959, Saturday 3 February: MICRO
- Wordle #958, Friday 2 February: CLEFT
- Wordle #957, Thursday 1 February: ALIVE
- Wordle #956, Wednesday 31 January: BULKY
- Wordle #955, Tuesday 30 January: EXPEL
- Wordle #954, Monday 29 January: LEGGY
- Wordle #953, Sunday 28 January: EMBER
- Wordle #952, Saturday 27 January: SNAKE
- Wordle #951, Friday 26 January: ALOOF
- Wordle #950, Thursday 25 January: BLOCK
- Wordle #949, Wednesday 24 January: RELIC
- Wordle #948, Tuesday 23 January: STILL
- Wordle #947, Monday 22 January: TWEAK
- Wordle #946, Sunday 21 January: NORTH
- Wordle #945, Saturday 20 January: LARGE
- Wordle #944, Friday 19 January: THING
- Wordle #943, Thursday 18 January: STOLE
- Wordle #942, Wednesday 17 January: COURT
- Wordle #941, Tuesday 16 January: BLOND
- Wordle #940, Monday 15 January: LUNCH
- Wordle #939, Sunday 14 January: DOING
- Wordle #938, Saturday 13 January: HEARD
- Wordle #937, Friday 12 January: ROUTE
- Wordle #936, Thursday 11 January: BRIEF
- Wordle #935, Wednesday 10 January: THREW
- Wordle #934, Tuesday 9 January: LINER
- Wordle #933, Monday 8 January: FINAL
- Wordle #932, Sunday 7 January: STONY
- Wordle #931, Saturday 6 January: CABLE
- Wordle #930, Friday 5 January: LUNGE
- Wordle #929, Thursday 4 January: SCANT
- Wordle #928, Wednesday 3 January: TWIRL
- Wordle #927, Tuesday 2 January: AGING
- Wordle #926, Monday 1 January: MURAL
- Wordle #925, Sunday 31 December: SALTY
- Wordle #924, Saturday 30 December: THREE
- Wordle #923, Friday 29 December: CHILD
- Wordle #922, Thursday 28 December: LEARN
- Wordle #921, Wednesday 27 December: DAISY
- Wordle #920, Tuesday 26 December: PHONE
- Wordle #919, Monday 25 December: EVOKE
- Wordle #918, Sunday 24 December: GRACE
- Wordle #917, Saturday 23 December: SLOPE
- Wordle #916, Friday 22 December: TOUCH
- Wordle #915, Thursday 21 December: BUILT
- Wordle #914, Wednesday 20 December: SMALL
- Wordle #913, Tuesday 19 December: TABLE
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.
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