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 #899) – 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 #899) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is Y.
Y is not a common starting letter at all. In fact, it’s the third least common ahead of only Z and X!
Wordle hints (game #899) – 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 #899) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is G.
G is not a common letter to end a Wordle answer – in fact only 41 of Wordle’s 2,309 games finish with one.
Wordle hints (game #899) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #899.
- Today’s Wordle answer has not been around for long.
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 #899)
Today’s Wordle answer (game #899) is… YOUNG.
Y has a special status among all of the letters in the alphabet, when it comes to Wordle: it has the biggest difference between the number of times it appears at the start of an answer and the number of times it appears at the end.
Want proof? Among Wordle’s 2,309 original solutions, Y features at the end 364 times, behind only E. But it appears at the start a mere six times, ahead of only Z and X.
How is this relevant to the difficulty or otherwise of YOUNG as an answer? Well, it’s a letter that many people would only think to play when the format suggested that a Y-ending was likely – for instance if you had a green L in position four, because LY is a common ending combination (the third most likely overall, as it happens). A T or D in position #4 might suggest the same thing.
This wasn’t the case today, so it’s unlikely that many people will have stumbled across a yellow Y earlier in the game, then moved it to the start of the word. Instead, most will have had to take a different route to the answer – but that’s not that easy here, because O, U, N and G don’t feature in many of the best Wordle starting words.
Obviously some starter words do contain one or more of those letters – CRANE has an N, CRONE an O and N. But it’s not like having a T, R, E or A in there, in terms of commonality. This probably bumped up the overall average for the game, which WordleBot says stands at 3.8; not hard, but approaching the midway point for Wordle and more difficult than yesterday’s WORST or Sunday’s ADAPT.
My opening guess, STARE, doesn’t include any of YOUNG’s five letters, so I was left with a massive list of 318 possible answers for my second guess. And no, I did not try to list them all. Instead, I did what I always do after I’ve drawn a blank on the first guess, and played CLOUD next.
This worked pretty well, giving me yellow O and U and cutting 318 options down to eight – but my luck was about to get even better. I could only find two answers, BOUGH and YOUNG, so decided to go with the latter of those because it’s a more common word. And, of course, that proved to be a good hunch, because it was correct. But it could have been very different; if I’d have spent more time looking, maybe I’d have come up with one or more of JUMBO, BUXOM, UNION, UNBOX, GUMBO or FUNGO.
I’m pretty certain I would have dismissed some of these as unlikely, but I might have played the likes of UNION or UNBOX. Anyway, that’s irrelevant now, because I instead went with YOUNG and scored a rather fortunate 3/6.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #898)
In a different time zone where it’s still Monday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #898, 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 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 T.
T is a very common letter to end a Wordle answer – in fact only E and Y are more likely in that position.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #898.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is not the best.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #898)
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #898) was… WORST.
Except it’s not really the worst. Though it is WORST. Or to put it another way: this is another fairly easy Wordle answer to find.
WordleBot says it has an average score of 3.6, matching the total for yesterday’s game, ADAPT (see below). But it’s actually quite a different game from that one. For one, there are no repeated letters here. Nor is it a game where any of the popular starting words cut down the answers list considerably. And whereas all of the letters in ADAPT were common, WORST begins with a W – which ranks only 21st in terms of how frequently it appears within the game’s original 2,309 answers.
However, WORST benefits by including four really, really common letters and in being such a commonly used word that many people will have guessed it early on, which is probably not so true of ADAPT.
Some of the best Wordle starting words did still help cut things down; CARET left a mere six options and ROAST just a single one. But neither are among the most commonly played opening words, so that won’t have had much of an impact on the overall average score; this is just a straightforward puzzle to solve.
As far as my own game went, STARE gave me three yellows (S, T and R) and left me with 16 possibles. I jotted down 15 of these myself, missing only WURST – which I guess might be an answer, even if it seems unlikely. The 15 words on my list split roughly into two groups: those that ended RST (WORST, BURST, FIRST etc) and those that went -R-ST (WRIST, GRIST, FROST, TRUST, TRYST). There were also a few outliers including TRUSS and TORUS.
I decided the best approach would be to establish where the T went by playing TRUST. That would also narrow down which of the two main groupings the answer fell into (or indeed, if it was one of the anomalies). And it worked: TRUST gave me an ST at the end but confirmed that the R wasn’t into position #2, that the T wasn’t repeated and that there was no U.
That left me with three answers: FIRST, WORST and ROUST. In one sense, it didn’t matter which I played – any of the three would guarantee a 4/6 at worst. But ROUST seemed the least likely word, and I had a vague sense that FIRST might have been a past Wordle answer (it had, in August 2021 – though realistically I couldn’t have remembered that and just got lucky). So with that in mind, I played WORST and scored a slightly fortunate 3/6.
Wordle answers: The past 50
I’ve been playing Wordle every day for more than a year 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 #898, Monday 4 December: WORST
- Wordle #897, Sunday 3 December: ADAPT
- Wordle #896, Saturday 2 December: GENRE
- Wordle #895, Friday 1 December: TAKEN
- Wordle #894, Thursday 30 November: RESIN
- Wordle #893, Wednesday 29 November: SUSHI
- Wordle #892, Tuesday 28 November: SCOPE
- Wordle #891, Monday 27 November: TAWNY
- Wordle #890, Sunday 26 November: SOLID
- Wordle #889, Saturday 25 November: GUIDE
- Wordle #888, Friday 24 November: THROW
- Wordle #887, Thursday 23 November: QUEEN
- Wordle #886, Wednesday 22 November: PIXEL
- Wordle #885, Tuesday 21 November: PIANO
- Wordle #884, Monday 20 November: CANDY
- Wordle #883, Sunday 19 November: QUEUE
- Wordle #882, Saturday 18 November: THINK
- Wordle #881, Friday 17 November: TARDY
- Wordle #880, Thursday 16 November: TRUST
- Wordle #879, Wednesday 15 November: SIGHT
- Wordle #878, Tuesday 14 November: SASSY
- Wordle #877, Monday 13 November: GREEN
- Wordle #876, Sunday 12 November: MEANT
- Wordle #875, Saturday 11 November: ACTOR
- Wordle #874, Friday 10 November: LEASH
- Wordle #873, Thursday 9 November: GLAZE
- Wordle #872, Wednesday 8 November: NINJA
- Wordle #871, Tuesday 7 November: LIMIT
- Wordle #870, Monday 6 November: TRADE
- Wordle #869, Sunday 5 November: FLARE
- Wordle #868, Saturday 4 November: MANIA
- Wordle #867, Friday 3 November: ARDOR
- Wordle #866, Thursday 2 November: UNTIL
- Wordle #865, Wednesday 1 November: NOISE
- Wordle #864, Tuesday 31 October: BLEAK
- Wordle #863, Monday 30 October: GRAIL
- Wordle #862, Sunday 29 October: PHONY
- Wordle #861, Saturday 28 October: MASON
- Wordle #860, Friday 27 October: NOBLE
- Wordle #859, Thursday 26 October: PIQUE
- Wordle #858, Wednesday 25 October: RETRY
- Wordle #857, Tuesday 24 October: CAUSE
- Wordle #856, Monday 23 October: TEMPO
- Wordle #855, Sunday 22 October: GIVEN
- Wordle #854, Saturday 21 October: SMIRK
- Wordle #853, Friday 20 October: OCCUR
- Wordle #852, Thursday 19 October: SPLAT
- Wordle #851, Wednesday 18 October: MERCY
- Wordle #850, Tuesday 17 October: ADULT
- Wordle #849, Monday 16 October: GRAPH
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 2023.
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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