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 #960) – 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 #960) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is V.
V is a fairly uncommon starting letter in Wordle. There are only 43 answers that begin with a V, and it ranks just 16th.
Wordle hints (game #960) – clue #3 – repeated letters
Does today’s Wordle have any repeated letters?
• There are 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 #960) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is E.
E is the most common letter to end a Wordle answer by far. That’s one of the reasons why many of the best start words, including SLATE, CRANE, CRATE and STARE, all end with one.
Wordle hints (game #960) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #960.
- Today’s Wordle answer is on the threshold.
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 #960)
Today’s Wordle answer (game #960) is… VERGE.
I never like scoring more than a 4/6, because unless you suffer from bad luck I think most Wordles are solvable in that many guesses. It’s not arrogance (I hope); I have an advantage over many players, in that I’ve been writing about it daily for two years. Given the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about Wordle, it would be a pretty poor show from me if I didn’t beat the average the majority of the time.
However, there are days when I’m prepared to accept that a 5/6 is a perfectly acceptable result, and this is one of them.
VERGE has an average score of 4.7, which makes it the joint hardest so far in 2024, and indeed one of the more difficult games in Wordle’s history. It has a repeated letter, it starts with an uncommon letter, and it’s similarly spelled to several other words. For instance, many people today guessed MERGE, PURGE, FORGE, NERVE, VERVE and VERSE at various stages of the game. Put all that together and you have a perfect storm.
Coincidentally, STORM was the random start word served up to me today, and it probably ended any hopes I had of finishing with a score of 4/6 right away. STORM is not a terrible opening guess by any means, but it was very unlucky today and left me with a whopping 341 possible solutions.
In contrast, some of the best Wordle starting words made rather more headway in cutting down those options. TRACE and CRATE, for instance, left 42, while CARET was better still at 36. CARTE was the winner among WordleBot’s top 20, though; it left only 21 answers.
Getting a single yellow on the first guess is not an uncommon experience, so I was in blissful ignorance about quite how poorly my game was about to go. I followed it up with CRANE, which used the two most common vowels and three of the four most common consonants still available to me (I would have liked to have got the other one, L, into my word but couldn’t see an easy way to do that).
CRANE was a “terrific choice”, said WordleBot, and it was also quite successful in that it gave me a green E and cut the options to 11. Unfortunately, those 11 words featured a lot of different consonants between them.
I had independently come up with seven of them myself: REVUE, PURGE, VERGE, VERVE, EERIE, RIDGE and DIRGE. I missed RIFLE, somehow, plus PUREE, RUPEE (which was a past Wordle answer) and RUBLE (which seems unlikely).
Based on the words I’d jotted down, I needed to work out if there was a U, I or second E, as far as vowels went. And I needed to narrow down V, P, G and D for consonants. So I played DIRGE, because it seemed the best way to do that while giving me a chance of solving it.
DIRGE was not a superb guess, but it wasn’t terrible, and it confirmed the pattern as the –RGE one that could now lead to only VERGE or PURGE. And that meant I had a 50/50 ahead of me. I trusted in my don’t-play-a-double-on-a-50/50 rule and went with PURGE, and that was of course wrong. So a 5/6 it was for me today, and I don’t even feel like I did much wrong.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #959)
In a different time zone where it’s still Saturday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #959, 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 M.
M is a middling letter when it comes to starting a word. It sits 10th in the rankings, with 107 occurrences in the 2,309 answers.
- 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 O.
O is a middling ending letter. It ranks 12th in this regard, and finishes 58 Wordle answers in total.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #959.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is very small.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #959)
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #959) was… MICRO.
It’s been a real up and down week in Wordle, with several very difficult games but a couple of easy ones over the past two days. MICRO, with its average score of 3.9, fits neatly between those extremes.
I’m slightly surprised that it’s as high as that, because it doesn’t have any major complications; it’s not a slightly more uncommon word in the way that yesterday’s CLEFT was, and it’s made up of five common letters with no duplicates.
Instead, the problem is likely to be that the letters are almost too common. WordleBot reports that lots of people played CHOIR, MINOR and, er, CHIRO (whatever that means) on guesses two and three, so maybe that pushed the average up a little.
The other factor is that there’s no E or A here, which slightly reduced the effectiveness of most of the best Wordle starting words. Many of the most popular options, including TRACE, SLATE, STARE and ADIEU, include both of those letters, so they generally had double-figure options for guess #2, rather than single-figure tallies. TRACE, for example, left 28 options, while STARE was at 24.
My opening word was PLUMB – which was not a great word today, given that it left me with 178 options. However, it did give me an M, which would prove to be all-important today. I decided not to include it in my second guess, in favor of gaining more information by playing five new letters. And my choice for that was STARE, my favorite starter for most of the past two years. STARE only gave me a single letter, but that was a green R, and coupled with the yellow M – and the letters that had been ruled out – it was enough to reduced my answer pool to only two words.
I only found one, MICRO, because the other one was MYRRH. Yes, it’s a valid word, but it’s spelled in such an unusual way (for English) that I would never have spotted it. I therefore played MICRO thinking it was the only choice, and was happy to accept a third 3/6 score in a row.
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 #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
- Wordle #912, Monday 18 December: FUNNY
- Wordle #911, Sunday 17 December: BACON
- Wordle #910, Saturday 16 December: GLOBE
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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