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.
Marc is TechRadar’s UK Editor in Chief and has been playing Wordle for more than two years. He’s authored dozens of articles on the game for TechRadar and its sister site Tom’s Guide, including a detailed analysis of the most common letters in every position. His Wordle streak has reached the 500 mark (and is now in the 700s) and he’ll be inconsolable if he loses it. Yes, he takes it all too seriously.
Wordle hints (game #973) – 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 #973) – clue #2 – first letter
What letter does today’s Wordle begin with?
• The first letter in today’s Wordle answer is P.
P is a very common first letter among Wordle answers. It’s the fifth most common in the alphabet and begins 141 solutions in total.
Wordle hints (game #973) – 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 #973) – clue #4 – ending letter
What letter does today’s Wordle end with?
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is M.
M is a middling ending letter: it ranks 13th in this regard, and only completes 46 Wordle answers overall.
Wordle hints (game #973) – clue #5 – last chance
Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #973.
- Today’s Wordle answer is a sacred song.
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 #973)
Today’s Wordle answer (game #973) is… PSALM.
Before I talk about today’s game, an update on yesterday’s (see below), which is now running at a 4.6 average rather than 4.5. Clearly lots of people found it tough, which rather surprised me at the time, but I now have some expert insight into why that might be. And it comes from my 14-year-old daughter.
She’s not, it’s fair to say, a Wordle addict, but she plays it now and again. We were chatting about various things and she mentioned that she was going to try today’s puzzle (this chat took place yesterday), so I decided to stick around and watch. Well, I’m glad I did, because if she’s representative of lots of people then it explains the high average score. Her first guess was STAIR, which is pretty good and which gave her the first three letters, STA. And then, instead of doing what I would and playing another word that would narrow things down, she guessed STAND. And then STACK. And then STAMP. And then STAFF. Oh dear. On the final go she went for STASH and solved it, but it never occurred to me that people would still play in that way.
Right, I got sidetracked there, sorry. Let’s talk about PSALM, which could be a difficult one but which actually has a relatively low average of 3.7. No idea what my daughter will make of this one!
The really unusual thing about it is that PS start; PSALM is the only word in Wordle’s 2,309 original answers to have that combination. The LM ending is also unusual – only three Wordles have that.
That aside, it’s not too bad; all five letters are fairly common overall and it’s not as obscure a word as ASCOT or SCRAM. However, the PS opening is strange enough that I would expect it to have a higher score than this – certainly above 4.0.
One reason why it might have a lower than expected average is that SLATE, the fifth most common starting word today, left only one possible solution, as did PLATE. Others among the best Wordle starting words were not quite so successful, but STARE cut the numbers to 16 and LEAST to 12.
My starter today was BELLE, which was annoying as it only featured three different letters, thus denying me useful information. WordleBot said it was a solid guess all the same, and that it left 60 answers.
My second guess worked much harder. I decided not to include the already-green L and to instead play five new letters so as to catch up a little. With E ruled out I wanted to include A and either O or I, while getting in three of R, T, S C and N. I considered a couple of options, then went with ROAST.
This worked really well, giving me another green letter (the A), a yellow S and cutting my options to four. However, I only found three: SCALD, SCALP and SCALY, completely overlooking the possibility that S could go second after a P. Well, you would miss that, wouldn’t you?
I played SCALD thinking it would point the way to the answer anyway, and indeed it did – but not the way I expected. When the S turned yellow I was initially baffled. Either the S had to go at the end, which was very unlikely as Wordle doesn’t (generally) do plurals and I couldn’t think of a non-plural that ended –ALS – or the word had to be -SAL-.
That implied there would be a vowel before the S, but none fit. USAL-? ISAL-? ASAL-? None worked. So I went through the alphabet and realized PSAL- did have a solution, PSALM, and played that next for a 4/6.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #972)
In a different time zone where it’s still Friday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #972, 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 S.
S is the most common starting letter in the game, featuring in 365 of Wordle’s 2,309 answers. In fact, it’s almost twice as likely to begin an answer as the next most common starting letter, C.
- 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 #972.
- Today’s Wordle answer is a secret hoard, or the place you put it, or the act of putting it there.
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #972)
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #972) was… STASH.
I’ve said it before and no doubt I’ll say it again: I am hopeless at predicting which Wordles people will find difficult and which they won’t. Maybe my brain is not like most people’s. Anyway, WordleBot says people are really struggling with this one, because it has an average score of 4.5. That makes it the hardest since VERGE a couple of weeks ago (4.7), and worse than the likes of STIFF (4.3) and NEVER (4.2).
All of those words have something in common: a repeated letter. The letter in question here is the S, which is a lot less likely to appear multiple times than the E that was in VERGE and NEVER, with 49 instances among Wordle’s 2,309 original answers. Maybe that’s why this score is so high.
More likely it’s the fact that STASH has a similar spelling to so many other words. If you look at the first three letters, you could have STAMP or STAIN or STAND or STACK or STARK or STARE or STALE or START or many others. If you didn’t have those first three, but you had one or both of the last two, you might have had SMASH or SLASH or SWASH. Or, if you had a few yellows in there, maybe you got drawn in by TRASH or FLASH or SLOTH or SHUSH or so many others.
This, then, is one of those games where the best Wordle starting words might well have cut down the options nicely, but where you will still have needed several more guesses to solve it. TRACE left 25 and STARE 11, for instance, while CRATE was on 28 and SLATE on 15. All decent results. But narrowing down things from there may have been harder.
My start word was nowhere near as lucky: TABBY gave me a couple of yellows but left 136 possible answers. But my second guess fixed that in one fell swoop.
I decided to move the T to the end, because it’s most common there, and to put the A in the middle (ditto). An S would go nicely between the two, so all I needed to do was choose a couple more common letters to start with. Adding L and E for LEAST did the job.
And boy did it do the job! LEAST gave me a couple of greens, but left the T yellow – which essentially meant it was green too, because it could now only go in position #2.
That meant I had -TAS- to solve. The only letters that can go before a T like that are S, or the vowels – and OTAS-, UTAS- and ITAS- didn’t yield any words. So it was STAS-, which meant by a process of elimination it had to be STASH. I played that next for 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 #972, Friday 16 February: STASH
- Wordle #971, Thursday 15 February: ASCOT
- Wordle #970, Wednesday 14 February: TALON
- Wordle #969, Tuesday 13 February: SCRAM
- Wordle #968, Monday 12 February: PASTA
- Wordle #967, Sunday 11 February: NEVER
- Wordle #966, Saturday 10 February: FRIED
- Wordle #965, Friday 9 February: STIFF
- Wordle #964, Thursday 8 February: PLACE
- Wordle #963, Wednesday 7 February: AFTER
- Wordle #962, Tuesday 6 February: WHICH
- Wordle #961, Monday 5 February: REPEL
- Wordle #960, Sunday 4 February: VERGE
- 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
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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