Quick answer

Wordle is the New York Times' daily word game: everyone on earth gets the same five-letter word, and you have six guesses to find it. Green tiles mark letters in the right spot, yellow letters are in the word but misplaced, and gray letters aren't in it. A new puzzle unlocks each day at midnight in your local timezone.

What is the Wordle of the day?

The Wordle of the day is a single five-letter word, shared by every player worldwide, that resets once every 24 hours. That scarcity is the design: creator Josh Wardle deliberately shipped one puzzle per day — inspired by the New York Times Spelling Bee's minimalist design and daily cadence — so a game takes about three minutes and leaves you wanting more. It worked; Wordle was played 4.8 billion times during 2023 alone.

Each answer is drawn from a curated list of common words, follows American spelling (FAVOR, not FAVOUR), and is reviewed by the game's editor before it goes live. The answer itself can repeat — since February 2, 2026, the Times deliberately reuses past words, as covered in our answer-reuse explainer.

Illustrative Wordle board: two guesses show mixed green, yellow, and gray tiles, the middle rows are empty, and the bottom row reveals the word ASTER in green.
An illustrative board: the green, yellow, and gray tiles are the whole game — no points, no timer, just six rows of feedback.

Where do I play today's Wordle?

You play today's Wordle for free at nytimes.com/games/wordle, in any web browser — no download or payment required. The game also lives inside the New York Times Games app, where your stats sync between phone and desktop through a free NYT account.

The puzzle resets at midnight in your local timezone, so players in Auckland always reach a new word before players in New York. There is no official standalone Wordle app; anything in an app store using the name is a copycat, and copycat lists can even drift out of sync with the official answer sequence.

How does the Wordle of the day work?

The rules fit in six lines. Here is the whole game:

  1. Type any real five-letter word and press Enter.
  2. Read the colors: green is correct and placed, yellow is present but misplaced, and gray is normally absent.
  3. Keep green letters in position, move yellow letters to new slots, and stop guessing gray letters.
  4. Repeat until you solve the word or use all six guesses.
  5. Watch for double letters — if your guess has a letter twice but the answer has it once, only one tile lights up.
  6. Invalid words get a “Not in word list” message and don't cost a turn.
CRANE

In this example, A stays in position three, C belongs somewhere else, and R, N, and E can usually be removed.

The full reference — including the duplicate-letter scoring order and the orange-and-blue high-contrast mode — is in how to play Wordle and Wordle colors meaning. To turn those colors into a progressive clue ladder of your own, see Wordle hints without spoilers.

What is today's Wordle answer?

Today's Wordle answer — Friday, September 11, 2026, puzzle #1910 — is ASTER, a daisy-family flower named for the Greek word for star. WordleBot's average solve today is 3.7 guesses, with the sharpest openers (TASER, RATES, TEARS) leaving only the correct answer in play.

Prefer to earn it? Our Wordle answer todaypage publishes a spoiler-free hint ladder every morning — category, vowels, repeats, and the starting letter — plus the word's meaning and yesterday's answer. Want just one letter and nothing more? What today's Wordle starts with reveals the first letter and the strategy behind it. Or build the answer from your own tiles with the Wordle solver.

What are the best Wordle starting words?

The strongest openers are SLATE, CRANE, and TRACE: they test the most common letters (E, A, R, T) in their most common positions. The Times' own data tells the same story from the other direction — the most-played openers are ADIEU, AUDIO, STARE, RAISE, and ARISE, but players who lead with vowel-heavy words like ADIEU and AUDIO take more guesses on average.

You don't need a perfect opener to win. Computer solvers can crack any Wordle within five of the six allowed guesses, so a solid opener plus disciplined follow-ups keeps a streak alive almost every day. Our best starting words guide ranks the openers on our own letter-coverage counts.

What is Wordle hard mode?

Hard mode forces you to reuse every revealed letter — any green letter must stay in place and any yellow letter must appear in your next guess. Turn it on from the settings gear and you can never waste a row “testing” a letter you already know about. The trade-off: you also can't burn a probe word to eliminate candidates, which makes _IGHT-style pattern puzzles genuinely harder. See the hard-mode guide for legal-guess strategy.

How do streaks, stats, and WordleBot work?

Your guess distribution, win percentage, and current streak live in the game's stats panel. With a free NYT account those stats sync across devices; without one, they're stored in your browser and can be lost when you clear data — the reason many players sign in.

WordleBot reviews your completed game and scores each guess on skill and luck, then tells you whether your line beat the bot's. The daily puzzle itself stays free; the WordleBot breakdown and the puzzle archive sit behind the NYT Games subscription.

Who made Wordle? The Josh Wardle story

Wordle began as a gift. Software engineer Josh Wardle built the first version for his partner, Palak Shah, who loves word games; Shah personally filtered the word list from roughly 13,000 five-letter words down to about 2,000 familiar ones. Wardle released the game publicly in October 2021, and the emoji-based results grid turned it into a viral sensation — from 90 players on November 1, 2021, to 300,000 by January 2, 2022, and over 2 million a week later, with 1.2 million results shared on Twitter in the first two weeks of January alone.

The New York Times Company acquired Wordle on January 31, 2022, for an undisclosed price in the low seven figures — Vanity Fair reported the Times narrowly outbid The Washington Post — and moved the game to its own site on February 10. Tracy Bennett became the game's first dedicated editor in November 2022, reviewing every day's word from the curated list.

Wordle in 2026 — what's new

  • A prime-time game show is coming.In May 2026, NBC announced a Wordle game show for 2027, co-produced with The New York Times and Jimmy Fallon's Electric Hot Dog, with Savannah Guthrie hosting. It's the game's biggest format change since launch.
  • Answers now repeat on purpose. Since February 2, 2026, the Times reuses past words alongside new ones — our repeats tracker lists every confirmed reuse and why it started.
  • The numbers are still enormous.Wordle logged 4.8 billion plays in 2023 and was Google's most-searched term of 2022 — a year in which seven of the ten most-searched word definitions (including CACAO, CANNY, and FORAY) were Wordle answers.
  • The board game is on shelves.Hasbro's Wordle: The Party Game has been available since October 2022, alongside other licensed NYT Wordle merchandise.

Games like Wordle

If one puzzle a day isn't enough, the Times' own games extend the habit: Connections (group 16 words into four categories), Strands (find theme words in a letter grid), and Spelling Bee (build words around a center letter). Outside the Times, Quordle runs four Wordles at once, Worldle tests geography from a country silhouette, Heardle is Wordle for music, and Globle guesses countries by distance. Each keeps the one-a-day format that makes Wordle work.

Sources and further reading