Wordle is the reason every other game on our hub of daily word games exists, including the one you are probably here for. Josh Wardle built it for one person in 2021, released it publicly that October, and sold it to The New York Times three months later. Its real invention was not the mechanic but the shape: one puzzle, everyone gets the same one, come back tomorrow. Contexto borrowed that shape exactly and replaced the letters with meaning.
Today’s Wordle answer
We do not republish the daily Wordle word. The New York Times owns the puzzle, the answer list is already baked into their page, and a site reposting it every morning is adding a page to the web that nobody needed.
Wordle reveals it on its own terms:
- Six failed guesses ends the round and shows the word.
- Hard mode does not change that; the reveal is the same.
- The answer is identical worldwide on a given date, because the list ships with the page — which is also why it rolls over at your local midnight rather than a single global moment.
If you have two guesses left and want to save the round, the openers and the repeated-letter trap below are the useful part. For a daily whose solution is published deliberately, Contexto’s answer page carries today’s word behind a spoiler blur.
What Wordle is
A five-letter English word is hidden. You have six guesses. Each guess must be a real word, and after each one every letter is coloured:
- Green — right letter, right position.
- Yellow — right letter, wrong position.
- Grey — letter is not in the answer at all.
That is the whole game. There is no hint system, no archive on the official site, and one puzzle per day for everyone in the world simultaneously — the answer list is baked into the page, which is why the puzzle is identical everywhere and why the day rolls over at local midnight.
How to play
- Open with a word rich in common letters. You are buying information, not trying to win on guess one.
- Use the greys aggressively. Eliminated letters are usually worth more than confirmed ones early on.
- Watch for repeated letters — they are the single most common cause of a lost round. A yellow E does not mean there is only one E.
- On guess four or five, if you have several candidates that differ by one letter (SHAPE / SHAKE / SHAME / SHAVE), consider spending a guess on a word that tests three of those letters at once rather than gambling.
Hard mode forces every revealed hint to be used in subsequent guesses, which removes the tactic in step four and makes the game meaningfully harder.
Openers worth using
The analysis on this has been done exhaustively, and the consensus is stable:
- CRANE and SLATE — the two most information-dense single openers under standard scoring.
- ADIEU — front-loads four vowels; popular, though weaker than it feels because it wastes a slot on U.
- CRANE → MOIST — a two-word pair covering ten distinct high-frequency letters, and the practical optimum for most players.
The important thing is consistency rather than the specific choice. A fixed opener means you learn what its feedback patterns imply, which is worth more than a marginally better word you have no intuition for. The same logic applies to Contexto, where we recommend keeping a stable set of opening probes for exactly the same reason.
Wordle vs Contexto
They share a format and nothing else.
| Contexto | Wordle | |
|---|---|---|
| What’s measured | Meaning | Spelling |
| Guesses | Unlimited | Six |
| Can you lose? | No | Yes |
| Vocabulary size | ~30,000 ranked words | ~2,300 possible answers |
| Feedback per guess | One number, always informative | Up to five colour signals |
| Session length | 10–20 minutes | 2–4 minutes |
Wordle is a constraint-satisfaction puzzle: each guess prunes a known, finite candidate list, and a careful player can solve it deterministically. Contexto is a search problem in a space you cannot enumerate — there is no list to prune, only a gradient to follow. That is why Wordle rewards a fixed opening system and Contexto rewards flexibility.
It also explains why the two games fail differently. A bad Wordle round ends; a bad Contexto round just gets long, which is why the game ships hints and a give-up option rather than a loss state. The full explanation of Contexto’s ranking and its three hint difficulties covers how that safety net is designed.
If you have four minutes, play Wordle. If you have fifteen and want the puzzle to fight back, today’s Contexto word is waiting.
Where to go next
Connections is the other Times daily and the better companion to Contexto, because it also runs on meaning rather than letters. For the semantic mechanic in another language, Cemantle plays the French version of the same idea.
Quordle, Octordle, Waffle and six other Wordle descendants are compared on the games like Contexto hub.