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, and you can also take a look at my NYT Strands today and NYT Connections today pages for my 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 #1125) – 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 #1125) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is N.
N is a surprisingly uncommon starting letter. Only 37 games begin with it and it ranks just 18th in this regard.
Wordle hints (game #1125) – 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 #1125) – 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 #1125) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #1125.
- Today’s Wordle answer is geeky.
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 #1125)
- NYT average score: 4.0
- My score: 4
- WordleBot’s score: 3
- Best start word performance*: TRADE (2 remaining answers)
- My start word performance: TWIST (1,161)
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Today’s Wordle answer (game #1125) is… NERDY.
NERDY should be an easy Wordle really, on account of it being formed entirely from common letters. However, WordleBot says it currently has an average score of 4.0, which is a little higher than standard. And honestly, I don’t have an explanation for that.
It could be that people first played a similarly spelled word such as NEEDY or NERVY, and so needed one extra guess. Or it could be that it’s a bit too much of a colloquial term, and so people didn’t think of it at all until late on. Maybe it’s just bad luck.
Not that 4.0 is that high of course, but it’s higher than either QUITE or VIDEO, which I would have thought would be more difficult than NERDY is. Although that said, I scored a four myself today, against a three for QUITE yesterday, so I’m defeating my own argument there.
The odds were stacked against me here, admittedly. My start word was TWIST, which was spectacularly unhelpful and left me with more than 1,000 options (1,161, to be exact). Things could only get better from there, and they did: my second guess, CRANE, cut those options to nine.
Several of these nine were ER words: LONER, UNDER, NEVER, GONER. I didn’t bother looking for any more, because ER words terrify me, so I wanted to establish as quickly as possible whether that was indeed the format. I played DONER, and uncovered a D to go with the other letters, all of which were still yellow, annoyingly.
No matter – that now left me with only one possible answer, and that was NERDY. All rather mundane once again.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #1124)
In a different time zone where it’s still Wednesday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #1124, too.
- Wordle yesterday had vowels in three 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 Q.
Q is one of the least likely letters to start a Wordle answer – but then again, it’s also one of the least common letters in the game anywhere!
- 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 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.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #1124.
- Yesterday’s Wordle answer is positively or completely.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1124)
- NYT average score: 3.8 (revised)
- My score: 3
- WordleBot’s score: 4
- Best start word performance*: TRICE (9 remaining answers)
- My start word performance: HONOR (872)
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1124) was… QUITE.
You might expect today’s answer to have a much higher average score than its current 3.9 [note: revised to 3.8], because it begins with the second least common letter in the game. As my analysis of every Wordle answer shows Q appears in only 29 out of the game’s 2,309 original solutions, so it’s really very, very uncommon. And as we saw with JIFFY a few days ago, an uncommon letter can really complicate a Wordle.
But not all uncommon letters are made equal. The thing about Q is that it always goes before a U – which means that anyone who uncovered a green U in that second spot will have known that it was a possibility and could have factored it in to their deliberations. Add in the fact that you have three vowels here – more vowels usually equals an easier Wordle – and that the other letter, T, is also very common and you have the explanation for why it only has an average of 3.9 at the time of writing.
That TE ending will also have helped, because start words that have that combination fared well today. SLATE, CRATE and CARTE all left only 14 possible solutions, for instance. But even better – and even more relevant to the average score – is that ADIEU, the most popular of all opening words, left only eight options. Its near neighbor AUDIO was at 18, so also pretty good.
Me? Well, I began with HONOR, which was not good. At all. In fact, it gave me zero letters and left me 872 possibles, which is one of the worst results I’ve ever had.
Fortunately I played it safe on the second guess, with SLATE – and that proved to be the absolute best word I could have picked. SLATE gave me that TE ending, and coupled with the letters that had been ruled out, I now only had two possible solutions.
That might sound unlikely, but trust me, I checked! It took me a while to go through the various permutations, but I could only come up with QUITE and BUTTE, and that’s exactly the same as the two that WordleBot told me had been options after the game. Of those two I was always going to go with QUITE, so I played it next and scored a WordleBot-beating 3/6.
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 #1124, Wednesday 17 July: QUITE
- Wordle #1123, Tuesday 16 July: DECOY
- Wordle #1122, Monday 15 July: SWOON
- Wordle #1121, Sunday 14 July: VIDEO
- Wordle #1120, Saturday 13 July: ENACT
- Wordle #1119, Friday 12 July: JIFFY
- Wordle #1118, Thursday 11 July: CAMEO
- Wordle #1117, Wednesday 10 July: GAUNT
- Wordle #1116, Tuesday 9 July: BLARE
- Wordle #1115, Monday 8 July: SHAPE
- Wordle #1114, Sunday 7 July: CANON
- Wordle #1113, Saturday 6 July: SCOFF
- Wordle #1112, Friday 5 July: CRUSH
- Wordle #1111, Thursday 4 July: DEBUT
- Wordle #1110, Wednesday 3 July: THIGH
- Wordle #1109, Tuesday 2 July: INLAY
- Wordle #1108, Monday 1 July: ADAGE
- Wordle #1107, Sunday 30 June: BUDDY
- Wordle #1106, Saturday 29 June: ZEBRA
- Wordle #1105, Friday 28 June: DROVE
- Wordle #1104, Thursday 27 June: ORDER
- Wordle #1103, Wednesday 26 June: KNEAD
- Wordle #1102, Tuesday 25 June: SAVOR
- Wordle #1101, Monday 24 June: DOLLY
- Wordle #1100, Sunday 23 June: BUGLE
- Wordle #1099, Saturday 22 June: EDICT
- Wordle #1098, Friday 21 June: PAINT
- Wordle #1097, Thursday 20 June: SCENT
- Wordle #1096, Wednesday 19 June: TERSE
- Wordle #1095, Tuesday 18 June: COVER
- Wordle #1094, Monday 17 June: PRIOR
- Wordle #1093, Sunday 16 June: GRIND
- Wordle #1092, Saturday 15 June: PROUD
- Wordle #1091, Friday 14 June: VAULT
- Wordle #1090, Thursday 13 June: ANGST
- Wordle #1089, Wednesday 12 June: DETER
- Wordle #1088, Tuesday 11 June: SWUNG
- Wordle #1087, Monday 10 June: MANGA
- Wordle #1086, Sunday 9 June: CROWD
- Wordle #1085, Saturday 8 June: HENCE
- Wordle #1084, Friday 7 June: MELON
- Wordle #1083, Thursday 6 June: ETHER
- Wordle #1082, Wednesday 5 June: ORGAN
- Wordle #1081, Tuesday 4 June: GROOM
- Wordle #1080, Monday 3 June: STARK
- Wordle #1079, Sunday 2 June: BRAVO
- Wordle #1078, Saturday 1 June: BASIN
- Wordle #1077, Friday 31 May: CHAOS
- Wordle #1076, Thursday 30 May: GUMMY
- Wordle #1075, Wednesday 29 May: PAPAL
- Wordle #1074, Tuesday 28 May: MINUS
- Wordle #1073, Monday 27 May: SKIER
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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