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 today has vowels in two 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 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.
• 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.
• The last letter in today’s Wordle is 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 today? Here’s an extra one for game #1250.
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!
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Today’s Wordle answer (game #1250) is… NICHE.
I’m in the midst of a really poor Wordle run right now. My mojo has left me, my knack for the game gone. So far in November I’ve scored 14 fours and two fives, but only four threes. And today might be my worst game yet this month.
Yes, some of it is the result of my random start words leaving me an unenviable task, but even so I should have done better on some of these occasions. My excuse? Well, I’m going to blame my day job, because it’s a very busy time of year what with Black Friday deals to be found, features to be edited, meetings to be endured and end-of-year reports to be written. And make no mistake, Wordle is the kind of game where if you let your guard down and rush through things, it will punish you.
NICHE is not a difficult Wordle, at least based on its average score. That currently sits at 3.6, according to WordleBot, so others are clearly finding it a lot easier than I did. Maybe they all started with CRANE – which left only 11 possible solutions – or maybe they just played sensibly in a game which contains four very common letters and only one (H) that’s rather more middling.
My mistake was simple: I missed the answer on the third guess, and that shaped my game on the fourth (and ultimately fifth). I started with PURSE, a “strong” opening word that nonetheless left me with 148 options. But with a green E at the end, and with R and S ruled out, I had a good idea of the kind of format the answer might take. Essentially, that was -L-NE or -L-DE (for the likes of CLONE, GLIDE, PLANE, BLADE), or –DGE (BADGE, HEDGE), or –NCE (FENCE, DANCE). There were plenty of others too, obviously, but those same consonants kept cropping up in my shortlist, so I played CLANG in order to rule in or out as many as possible.
WordleBot loved this, and told me afterwards that I’d cut the list from 148 to a mere six. Unfortunately, I only found four: HENCE, FENCE, WINCE and MINCE. And that therefore informed my poor third guess, WHOMP, which was designed to narrow down those four.
It would have done so, too, had the answer been among them; but obviously it wasn’t. WHOMP therefore left two words, HENCE and NICHE, but in my head I still had only the one and played HENCE next only to be surprised for the second day in a row when it proved to be wrong. I took another look and found NICHE next, but by then the damage was done.
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
In a different time zone where it’s still Tuesday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #1249, too.
* 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).
G is the eighth most common starting letter, featuring in 115 Wordle answers. It’s often paired with an L to make GL—, but I’m not revealing whether that’s the case today.
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.
G is not a common letter to end a Wordle answer – in fact only 41 of Wordle’s 2,309 games finish with one.
Still looking for more Wordle hints? Here’s an extra one for game #1249.
* From WordleBot’s Top 20 start words
Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #1249) was… GOING.
Here’s a fact for you: there are only 11 words in Wordle’s original answer list that contain two or more Gs. LEGGY (game #954) was the last before this one, and we’ve also had AGING (#927), FOGGY (#493), SOGGY (#465), BUGGY (#412), GORGE (#204) and GOUGE (#133) – so eight of them, leaving three more to come.
Another fact: this is the only one of the 11 to both start and end with a G, which is perhaps not that surprising given that G is a reasonably uncommon ending letter in Wordle: only 14th by frequency, compared to eighth at the start. You might expect it to appear more often at the end given that in the English language it is rather more likely to turn up there, but that’s because of the -ING pattern – and there are not too many of these in Wordle, simply because it’s a five-letter game.
I say there are not too many, but it’s actually the most likely three-letter ending combination in the game, with 23 examples among the original 2,309. But it’s all relative; that’s a mere 1% of all Wordles, after all.
I didn’t play for it, at any rate, and so ended up with a four that possibly should have been a three. I had a decent start, with SNIPE giving me one green (I) and one yellow (N), and leaving 43 answers. This was a better result than for many of the top choices, with CRANE (63) a little behind and STARE (321) a long way back. That poor start word performance may partly explain why the average today is a relatively high 4.2.
I followed up with GRIND, reasoning that an IN-something ending was likely, whether ING, INK or INT. I had the G in there at the start for the same reason; my hope was that I’d know one way or the other which of those endings it was after this guess.
GRIND was very lucky, and cut my word list to just two: GOING and GLINT. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought of the first of those, so played the second and was stunned when it didn’t turn green. The problem was that I hadn’t allowed for the repeated G, and when it turned green at the start I assumed that was the only place it would be. I realized my mistake soon enough, but had to settle for a 4/6 – which is becoming a bit of a habit in recent weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A Swiss church is trying a new way of connecting with Jesus in the confessional. It uses AI to simulate the personality of the 1st-century Galileleean for visitors as part of a religiously themed art project called Deus in Machina (God in a Machine). The digital simulacrum of Jesus Christ engages with visitors and offers spiritual guidance based on what people say.
If you enter the confessional, you’ll see the AI Jesus displayed on a screen. The decidedly Swiss-looking man from the Roman-run Middle East of two millennia ago listens to people voice their questions or concerns. The AI model underlying the simulation was built by a team from the church working with the Immersive Realities Research Lab at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts using the New Testament as the basis for how Jesus thinks and speaks. So far, it’s performed well.
“AI fascinates us. But it also has its limits and raises ethical questions,” St. Peter’s theologian Marco Schmid explained in a statement (translated from German by Google). “In all previous tests, his answers have matched our theological understanding of St. Peter’s Chapel.”
The video of people reacting to AI Jesus shows some mixed reviews. One parishioner expressed surprise at how easy it was and how good the advice they received was. Another said it was very generic and not very impressive. A disagreement over religious interpretation suggests AI Jesus is performing exactly as it should. Now that AI Jesus is here, the question is, what comes next?
If you want to experience the other side of the religious experience, you can try Social AI, an entire universe where you are the only real person, and everyone you talk to is just an AI character. Or you could go for being a kind of priest yourself for the traumatized AI personalities you encounter at Friend.com. If you’re truly uncertain about how to use AI ethically in a religious context, you can always ask the Pope. He and IBM have put together a whole guide for ethical AI use.