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 #956) – 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 #956) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is B.
B is a very, very common starting letter in Wordle. In fact, it’s the third most common overall, behind only S and C.
Wordle hints (game #956) – 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 #956) – 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 #956) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #956.
- Today’s Wordle answer is large and voluminous.
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 #956)
Today’s Wordle answer (game #956) is… BULKY.
Here we go again. For the fourth game in a row – and fifth in six days – today’s Wordle is a tricky one. WordleBot says it has an average score of 4.3, following 4.7, 4.4 and 4.7 over the previous three (yesterday’s game was upgraded from 4.6).
It’s really quite rare to have four scores of more than 4.0 in a row these days. It happened quite often initially – over the 500-odd games I’ve tracked there have been about a dozen periods when we’ve had a run like this, or longer – but the last time we saw a sequence like this was back in August 2023. On that occasion we had POLYP (4.3), BROOK (4.7), BULLY (4.3) and LOVER (4.3), and the penultimate word in that list is relevant to today’s puzzle.
Why? Well, BULKY is not a horribly difficult word in some regards; B is a very common letter to start a Wordle answer, Y a very common letter to end one, U and L are both common letters in general. K isn’t, particularly – but it’s not as rare as the X in yesterday’s EXPEL. No, the problem here is that similarity with BULLY, which accounted for 6.7% of third guesses and 11.3% of fourth. Throw in other similarly spelled words – LUCKY, BULGY, FULLY, BULLY, HULKY, SULKY – and you have lots of choice. I doubt many people will fail, but lots will cut it down to a few options but still take a couple of guesses to find the right one.
The other factor is that not a single one of the top 20 best Wordle starting words chopped the options down to below 100. Not that I was concerned with that, because my randomly selected opener, SNAFU, wouldn’t have been anywhere near a top 20 list. It also wasn’t very helpful, leaving me 247 remaining answers.
I toyed with lots of options for the second guess, before settling on BRUTE; I’d wanted to include R, T and E together with the yellow U, so it was the obvious choice. And it proved very lucky, with that B at the start turning green and making my task a lot easier.
WordleBot says I now had nine options, and while I didn’t know that at the time I came up with all of them: BULLY, BULGY, BULKY, BUGGY, BUZZY, BUDDY, BUMPY, BUILD and BUXOM. However, I remembered that BULLY had been a past Wordle answer, and I didn’t think BULGY would be a solution at all, so dismissed those two.
What I needed, then, was a word that would narrow down the other seven and guarantee me a solve on the fourth guess. I worked out that MODEL would just about do that job, with the caveat that if no letters changed color it could still be BUGGY or BUZZY, and of course that if BULGY was a real answer then I could still have a 50/50 with that and BULKY.
It was exactly that latter scenario that played out, with the L turning yellow and ruling out all of the others (there was also an L in BUILD, but if that was the answer the D would also have changed color).
I technically had a 50/50, then, but was so certain that BULKY would be the real answer that I had no hesitation in playing it. My instinct was correct and I solved this one in 4/6.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #955)
In a different time zone where it’s still Tuesday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #955, 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 E.
We don’t get many Wordle answers that start with an E – though it’s the most common letter in the game, it’s only the 14th most likely to begin a solution.
- 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 L.
L is a really common letter to find at the end of a Wordle. There are 155 games that finish with an L, and it ranks as the fifth most likely letter there.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #955.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is to eject from somewhere or something.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #955)
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #955) was… EXPEL.
OK, now we’re talking. For the third day in a row we have a genuinely difficult Wordle to solve: WordleBot, the NYT’s all-knowing game guru, states that people are solving EXPEL in an average of 4.6 guesses. That follows 4.4 for yesterday’s LEGGY and 4.7 for Sunday’s EMBER.
The last time we had three successive games of above 4.0 was way back in August 2023, when SNAKY (4.1), INDEX (4.2) and SCRUB (4.1) appeared on consecutive days. But as you can see, those three games were all much easier than the most recent trio. Between them, the past three have an overall average of 4.57 – and to find another three games that were as hard as that, you’d need to scroll back to June last year, when we had JAZZY (5.5), HUMID (3.8) and NANNY (5.2) for an overall average of 4.83.
OK, I’m starting to bore even myself now, so I’ll move on. The key point is that today’s game is another really tough one. Partly that’s because it contains an X, the third least common letter in the game. A mere 37 of Wordle’s original 2,309 answers contain one, so it’s never a letter you’d expect to turn up – PIXEL, in November (game #886) was the last example.
Another factor is that it once again has two Es; not uncommon compared to other repeats, but still a lot less likely than getting just one of them. And for a third complication, I’ll throw in the fact that there are a few words that use most of the same letters. EXCEL is the obvious one, but the likes of REPEL and LEPER both have four letters in common, albeit in different positions.
In terms of the best Wordle starting words I might as well copy and paste yesterday’s words on this subject, because it was a similar situation. Three words were helpful: PLATE, PLANE and PLACE, all of which left 11 options. Most, however, weren’t.
My starter today was ARROW, which was in the latter camp: it gave me zero letters and left 722 answers. With very little info to go on, I focused on the most common remaining letters, which were E and I in terms of vowels, and T, L, S and N for consonants. There were various approaches I could have taken, and I nearly went with STILE, which WordleBot said was its choice. But instead I picked INLET, and that worked well.
INLET gave me a yellow L and green E, and cut the options to 14. I probably should have got home in two more guesses from here, but I mistakenly thought there were far fewer choices; I had BLEED and BLEEP, LEVEL, BEZEL and BEVEL written down, but had missed nine others including the obvious likes of SLEEP and SLEEK, as well as the actual answer.
So, I played BEVEL thinking that would point the way to the answer, but all it did was cut down my choices to two. Worse still, I still only found one of these, EXCEL, then played it immediately rather than looking for a little longer. D’oh! The upshot of all that was that I had to settle for another 5/6, my second in three games.
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 #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
- Wordle #912, Monday 18 December: FUNNY
- Wordle #911, Sunday 17 December: BACON
- Wordle #910, Saturday 16 December: GLOBE
- Wordle #909, Friday 15 December: TOPIC
- Wordle #908, Thursday 14 December: WOULD
- Wordle #907, Wednesday 13 December: SPENT
- Wordle #906, Tuesday 12 December: THESE
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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