Looking for a different day?
A new NYT Wordle puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Friday’s puzzle instead then click here.
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? TechRadar’s Quordle today page contains hints and answers for that game, and you can also take a look at our NYT Strands today and NYT Connections today pages for our 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 #1428) – 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 #1428) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is G.
G is the eighth most common starting letter, featuring in 115 Wordle answers. It’s often paired with an R to make GR— or an L to make GL—, but I’m not revealing whether that’s the case today.
Wordle hints (game #1428) – 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 #1428) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is N.
N is a pretty common ending letter in Wordle: it’s the seventh most likely in that position and features in 130 solutions.
Wordle hints (game #1428) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #1428.
- Today’s Wordle answer is cultivated.
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 #1428)
- NYT average score: 4.2
- My score: 4
- WordleBot’s score: 3
- My skill score: 81
- My luck score: 49
- My start word performance: TRIBE (72 remaining answers)
- WordleBot’s start word performance: CRANE (6)
- Tomorrow’s start word: RIVER
Today’s Wordle answer (game #1428) is… GROWN.
Not my finest hour today, as I made a bit of a mess of the third guess and needed a healthy dose of luck to walk away with a four that I probably didn’t deserve.
It is yet another fairly tough one, though, with an average score of 4.2 at the time of writing. And I say ‘at the time of writing’ with good reason, because yesterday’s FIFTH changed from 5.0 when I wrote my column to 4.4 by the end of the day. I have no idea why it differed so greatly; maybe Americans found it easier than Aussies and Brits…
I doubt it will go down by too much, though, because GROWN has a little of the too-many-answers about it. Change that first letter and you could also have BROWN, or CROWN, or FROWN, or DROWN; change the fourth letter and you could have GROAN; change the last and you get GROWL.
There are lots of other possibles that share three of those letters, too, and that’s what caught me out a little today. I didn’t get the best start, with TRIBE leaving a green R but nothing more, and a hefty 72 options to trawl through. WordleBot, in contrast, only had six to pick from.
I didn’t come up with 72 words, but I did go a little overboard in drawing up a shortlist of, er, 39 of them. This was probably a waste of time, because it was obvious that what I needed to play some of the letters that go before an R – P, C, D, F, B, G and W, generally – and a couple of vowels.
So, after all of that word hunting I went with POUND and did okay – it cut my list to eight, which was not as few as I’d hoped for but not a disaster either.
And here’s where I made my mistake, in only finding a quartet of CROON, CROWN, FROWN and GROWN. The ones I missed were generally pretty obvious, too: GROAN was in there, plus ORGAN, ARSON and ARGON.
I decided to play BEFOG next, thinking that it would guarantee me a four. But while it did rule out three of the words on my shortlist, leaving only GROWN, in reality I still had three to choose from, with ORGAN and GROAN also contenders.
The fact that I’d missed them meant played into my hands when GROWN came up trumps, but I could easily have scored a five or six here. Not good enough.
How did you do today? Send me an email or let me know in the comments.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #1427)
In a different time zone where it’s still Friday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #1427, 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 F.
F is a very common starting letter in Wordle. It ranks seventh behind only S, C, B, T, P and A and overall there are 135 solutions that begin with this letter.
- 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 #1427.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is a fraction.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1427)
- NYT average score: 4.4 (revised)
- My score: 4
- WordleBot’s score: 3
- My skill score: 94
- My luck score: 59
- My start word performance: CHUMP (140 remaining answers)
- WordleBot’s start word performance: CRANE (356)
- Tomorrow’s start word: TRIBE
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1427) was… FIFTH.
Wordle creator Josh Wardle was clearly a fan of numerical solutions because we’ve now had almost all of those that could ever be answers.
Of the fractions, we’ve so far had FIRST (#56), THIRD (#549), SIXTH (#1231), NINTH (597) and TENTH (#773), which means FIFTH completes the set (the others – SECOND, FOURTH, etc – are all too long).
Or the numbers, THREE (#924), SEVEN (#1190), FORTY (#986) and FIFTY (#616) have been answers already, which by my reckoning means only EIGHT and SIXTY are still to come. That’s assuming that they will one day be solutions, but based on the others all having been included, I can only assume that they will be.
None of that will have helped you solve it, of course, and unfortunately this is yet another difficult one. WordleBot says it had an average score of 5.0 at the of writing, and that means that we have now had the equal toughest week of Wordles ever. Yes, really.
(Note – the average score was revised down to 4.4 by the end of the day, so the above is now not true; it was still a difficult week, but not the hardest ever. I have no idea why people playing later in the day found it easier, but they did.)
I mean, just look at them: 4.2, 4.4, 4.1, 3.9, 4.3, 5.5 and now 5.0. Aside from AWARE, which was not exactly an easy one itself, they’ve all been above 4.0, with the last two above 5.0.
Partly that’s down to repeated letters; FIFTH is the fourth in a row to contain more than one of a certain character, in this case F. In this specific case it may also be related to the fact that FILTH is an obvious alternative, and it was played by many people.
Either way, there are plenty of complications to it, so I was pleased to score a four.
My start word, CHUMP, left 140 options – not terrible, but better than the result for WordleBot’s CRANE, which left 356.
I followed up with TRASH, reasoning that as I had a yellow H that would probably go at the end of the word ahead of either a T or an S to make the very common TH or SH combinations.
My hunch was right; the H turned green and the T yellow, which pretty much guaranteed that it would be a TH word. And in fact, there were now only five of these: FILTH, FIFTH, NINTH, WIDTH and BOOTH, all of which I managed to identify.
Playing FILTH or FIFTH was the best option here, because going for any of the other three words would have left a three or possibly even four-way choice on the next guess. FILTH and FIFTH, meanwhile, would leave a 50/50 at worst.
I could instead have gone for a narrowing-down word in order to guarantee a solve in four – and I nearly did. But in the end I decided that the odds were in my favor, so went with FILTH. It wasn’t correct, but it left FIFTH as the only remaining solution, so I scored a four anyway.
Wordle answers: The past 50
I’ve been playing Wordle every day for more than three 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 #1427, Friday 16 May: FIFTH
- Wordle #1426, Thursday 15 May: EAGER
- Wordle #1425, Wednesday 14 May: BONGO
- Wordle #1424, Tuesday 13 May: AWARE
- Wordle #1423, Monday 12 May: BICEP
- Wordle #1422, Sunday 11 May: DOWEL
- Wordle #1421, Saturday 10 May: YEAST
- Wordle #1420, Friday 9 May: TRIPE
- Wordle #1419, Thursday 8 May: BALMY
- Wordle #1418, Wednesday 7 May: MACHO
- Wordle #1417, Tuesday 6 May: SUITE
- Wordle #1416, Monday 5 May: SHUSH
- Wordle #1415, Sunday 4 May: TROUT
- Wordle #1414, Saturday 3 May: PATSY
- Wordle #1413, Friday 2 May: WHOSE
- Wordle #1412, Thursday 1 May: ADEPT
- Wordle #1411, Wednesday 30 April: IDLER
- Wordle #1410, Tuesday 29 April: BLISS
- Wordle #1409, Monday 28 April: DUMMY
- Wordle #1408, Sunday 27 April: WEEDY
- Wordle #1407, Saturday 26 April: CLASH
- Wordle #1406, Friday 25 April: KNOWN
- Wordle #1405, Thursday 24 April: GENIE
- Wordle #1404, Wednesday 23 April: OZONE
- Wordle #1403, Tuesday 22 April: ARTSY
- Wordle #1402, Monday 21 April: SPATE
- Wordle #1401, Sunday 20 April: PATCH
- Wordle #1400, Saturday 19 April: INBOX
- Wordle #1399, Friday 18 April: DIRGE
- Wordle #1398, Thursday 17 April: STOOD
- Wordle #1397, Wednesday 16 April: MORAL
- Wordle #1396, Tuesday 15 April: ASHEN
- Wordle #1395, Monday 14 April: CREST
- Wordle #1394, Sunday 13 April: LAUGH
- Wordle #1393, Saturday 12 April: NURSE
- Wordle #1392, Friday 11 April: ARROW
- Wordle #1391, Thursday 10 April: TURBO
- Wordle #1390, Wednesday 9 April: WHEAT
- Wordle #1389, Tuesday 8 April: SPARE
- Wordle #1388, Monday 7 April: HAZEL
- Wordle #1387, Sunday 6 April: VILLA
- Wordle #1386, Saturday 5 April: FOAMY
- Wordle #1385, Friday 4 April: KRILL
- Wordle #1384, Thursday 3 April: SHEAR
- Wordle #1383, Wednesday 2 April: CURSE
- Wordle #1382, Tuesday 1 April: JEWEL
- Wordle #1381, Monday 31 March: BOOTY
- Wordle #1380, Sunday 30 March: QUOTA
- Wordle #1379, Saturday 29 March: SORRY
- Wordle #1378, Friday 28 March: VERSE
- Wordle #1377, Thursday 27 March: SHEET
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 2025.
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’ Games 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.
12. The NYT has added in some of its own words, that weren’t in that list of 2,309 solutions. More will undoubtedly come over the next few years.
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