NYT Wordle today — answer and my hints for game #1494, Tuesday, July 22

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.

Your Wordle expert

Your Wordle expert

Marc McLaren

Wordle hints (game #1494) – clue #1 – Vowels

* 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 #1494) – clue #2 – first letter

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 #1494) – clue #3 – repeated letters

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 #1494) – clue #4 – ending letter

T is a very common letter to end a Wordle answer – in fact only E and Y are more likely in that position.

Wordle hints (game #1494) – clue #5 – last chance

Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #1494.

• Today’s Wordle answer is how you might describe something that has been altered by fire or heat.

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 #1494)

• NYT average score: 3.5
• My score: 4
• WordleBot’s score: 3
• My skill score: 95
• My luck score: 47
• My start word performance: FATTY (278 remaining answers)
• WordleBot’s start word performance: SLATE (102)
• Tomorrow’s start word: EERIE

Today’s Wordle answer (game #1494) is… BURNT.

I had a fairly mundane run to a four today, on what is a fairly mundane Wordle.

It has an average score of 3.5 – making it far easier than most, particularly the recent likes of TIZZY, NERVY and FOIST – and contains no major complications.

It’s an interesting word, though. In British English, it’s used interchangeably with ‘burned’, but is gradually becoming the more archaic form; I would always write ‘burned’, for what it’s worth.

In US English, however, it would only ever be a used as the adjective form of the word, rather than the past-participle – for instance ‘he burned the toast’ but ‘I ate burnt toast’. In the UK, that distinction doesn’t exist. Again, though, it’s becoming far more common to used the ED version in the US, regardless of the context.

With that in mind, it’s slightly surprising to see it as an answer here – but that doesn’t appear to have made it tougher to solve.

Even a second successive failure on a first guess didn’t cause me too many difficulties. FATTY had given me only a yellow T and left 278 answers, but STORE reduced that to 11, at which point I started looking for possible answers.

I came up with seven of the 11 – PRINT, TRICK, TRUMP, TRUCK, TRUNK, BRUNT and GRUNT – but missed a quartet of RIGHT, THRUM, TRILL and, inevitably, the answer itself.

No matter; TRICK was the best word I could find to narrow down my shortlist, as well as potentially being the solution itself, and as it happened it also did the perfect job of ruling in/out the words I hadn’t found. When the T and R stayed yellow but the other letters were ruled out, it left BURNT as the only answer, albeit an answer that it took me a few more minutes to find.

Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #1493)

In a different time zone where it’s still Monday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #1493, 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 T.

T is one of the most common starting letters in the game, beginning 149 of Wordle’s 2,309 answers. That gives it a ranking of fourth in the alphabet, behind only S, C and B.

• 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 Y.

Y is the second most common ending letter in the game, behind only E. In total, 364 Wordle answers end with a Y.

Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #1493.

• Yesterday’s Wordle answer is an excited, distracted state.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1493)

• NYT average score: 5.1
• My score: 4
• WordleBot’s score: 4
• My skill score: 94
• My luck score: 46
• My start word performance: ALIBI (274 remaining answers)
• WordleBot’s start word performance: SLATE (102)
• Tomorrow’s start word: FATTY

Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1493) was… TIZZY.

Hands up if you lost your Wordle streak, then? I suspect a few of you will have done, because TIZZY is a monumentally difficult solution.

According to WordleBot it has an average score of 5.1 at the time of writing, and that makes it one of only seven games so far in 2025 to reach 5.0 or above.

In fact, it sits in equal fourth position for the year, difficulty-wise. Here’s how 2025 has shaped up on that front:

However, I didn’t need the ‘Bot to tell me that it was a toughie – one look at the letters was enough for that.

Z is a hard enough letter to play for on its own, but a double-Z? That’s just unfair. There are only five games among the original 2,309 Wordle solutions that contain more than one Z, so it really is a very unlikely occurrence.

That said, this wasn’t one of those five – instead, it’s yet another answer that’s been added to the original answers list by those dastardly puzzle setters at the New York Times.

The NYT appears to be ramping up the inclusion of non-original solutions, for reasons that are not clear to me. Maybe it’s about making the game more difficult – because many of the extra words has been stinkers.

This is the equal toughest of them, though, with KAZOO the only other one to reach the 5.0 mark.

This is now the fifth NYT word in the past month, and to put that in context, the previous five had spanned four months. We’ve now had 22 of them, but have no way of knowing how many more there are; well, unless the game’s editor Tracy Bennett spills the beans.

I’m pretty surprised – and pleased – that I managed a four, particularly after an opening guess that did not look promising. ALIBI does contain some common letters in the form of A, L and I, admittedly, but it’s a waste to have two of the latter, given that it’s not a particularly likely character to be repeated.

ALIBI gave me a yellow ‘I’ and left 274 options, and it also left open the possibility of an ER word. I played NICER next to guard against that, but succeeded only in turning that ‘I’ green.

I still had 49 options left at this stage, WordleBot told me later, and among them lurked a couple of nasty traps: -IGHT was the worst, but there were also a multitude of words that had a repeated letter after the ‘I’ and before a Y, for instance FIZZY, DIZZY, GIDDY, DIPPY, WITTY, KITTY and MISSY.

I deliberated for a long while about what to play next, and eventually decided it should be MOTHS, as I thought this would rule out the greatest number of possibles. That wasn’t quite true – MYTHS would have been better – but it was third on the ‘Bot’s list and cut the longlist down to a shortlist of two.

These were FIFTY and TIZZY and I was absolutely certain the former had been a past Wordle answer. I was right, too – those ‘number’ games always stick in the mind, even though this one was as far back as February 2023 (game #616).

That left TIZZY as the only possible solution, meaning I escaped with a four on a day when I’d probably have been happy enough with a five. Phew!

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 #1493, Monday 21 July: TIZZY
• Wordle #1492, Sunday 20 July: BLANK
• Wordle #1491, Saturday 19 July: SWORD
• Wordle #1490, Friday 18 July: LORIS
• Wordle #1489, Thursday 17 July: MODAL
• Wordle #1488, Wednesday 16 July: NERVY
• Wordle #1487, Tuesday 15 July: FOIST
• Wordle #1486, Monday 14 July: UNDID
• Wordle #1485, Sunday 13 July: GNOME
• Wordle #1484, Saturday 12 July: EXILE
• Wordle #1483, Friday 11 July: BRAND
• Wordle #1482, Thursday 10 July: JUMPY
• Wordle #1481, Wednesday 9 July: NOVEL
• Wordle #1480, Tuesday 8 July: DREAD
• Wordle #1479, Monday 7 July: STILT
• Wordle #1478, Sunday 6 July: ATRIA
• Wordle #1477, Saturday 5 July: BALER
• Wordle #1476, Friday 4 July: CURVE
• Wordle #1475, Thursday 3 July: POPPY
• Wordle #1474, Wednesday 2 July: INCUR
• Wordle #1473, Tuesday 1 July: MOLDY
• Wordle #1472, Monday 30 June: BLINK
• Wordle #1471, Sunday 29 June: WITTY
• Wordle #1470, Saturday 28 June: STUMP
• Wordle #1469, Friday 27 June: PLAIN
• Wordle #1468, Thursday 26 June: OFFER
• Wordle #1467, Wednesday 25 June: COMFY
• Wordle #1466, Tuesday 24 June: ELITE
• Wordle #1465, Monday 23 June: ODDLY
• Wordle #1464, Sunday 22 June: THRUM
• Wordle #1463, Saturday 21 June: GLADE
• Wordle #1462, Friday 20 June: TAUPE
• Wordle #1461, Thursday 19 June: CURIO
• Wordle #1460, Wednesday 18 June: MUNCH
• Wordle #1459, Tuesday 17 June: PRANK
• Wordle #1458, Monday 16 June: PETTY
• Wordle #1457, Sunday 15 June: QUAIL
• Wordle #1456, Saturday 14 June: GHOST
• Wordle #1455, Friday 13 June: BILGE
• Wordle #1454, Thursday 12 June: VIXEN
• Wordle #1453, Wednesday 11 June: PLAID
• Wordle #1452, Tuesday 10 June: TAFFY
• Wordle #1451, Monday 9 June: BOARD
• Wordle #1450, Sunday 8 June: LEASE
• Wordle #1449, Saturday 7 June: REUSE
• Wordle #1448, Friday 6 June: EDIFY
• Wordle #1447, Thursday 5 June: DATUM
• Wordle #1446, Wednesday 4 June: CEASE
• Wordle #1445, Tuesday 3 June: ADMIN
• Wordle #1444, Monday 2 June: PREEN
• Wordle #1443, Sunday 1 June: ROUGH

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 in 2022 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.

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