How to Find Today’s Wordle Answer (If You Must)

Before the how, the why-not. The whole game of Wordle is the daily uncertainty. Knowing the answer in advance is like knowing the last page of a mystery novel — you can still read the book, but the thing that made it a mystery is gone. If you are reading this because you are stuck on guess five with no green tiles, that’s fair. If you are reading this to skip the puzzle entirely, just know what you are giving up. Now: how to find today’s Wordle answer, three legitimate ways.

The honest framing

Wordle’s whole appeal is that the puzzle is the same for everyone, once a day, no replays. The mechanic is uncertainty under a six-guess constraint. Removing the uncertainty by reading the answer first turns the experience into typing five letters into a box. There is no satisfaction in green tiles when you already knew which letters they were going to be.

That said, people have legitimate reasons to want the answer. You missed yesterday and want to maintain your streak in spirit. You are writing about the game and need the day’s word. Your kid is crying because they cannot get the last letter. Whatever the reason, here are the working methods, ranked from most-DIY to least.

Method 1: Read the answer from the page source

This is the most direct method and the one that has worked since Josh Wardle’s original 2021 version. The Wordle page loads each day’s answer into the browser before you play it. With the original Wardle build, the answer was sitting in a JavaScript variable in the main bundle. After the NYT acquisition, the game moved behind the NYT Games API, but the answer still has to reach the client to verify your guesses — and so it is reachable.

The current NYT API approach

Open the NYT Wordle page. Open DevTools with F12 or Cmd + Option + I. Click the Network tab. Reload the page. Look for a request to a path like /svc/wordle/v2/ followed by a date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Click it. The response body is a JSON object with a solution field. That field is the day’s answer in plain text.

It is not exactly a hack — it is the API endpoint the game uses to fetch the puzzle. The Times has not encrypted or obfuscated this because doing so would mean the client cannot check guesses without a server round-trip per letter, which would ruin the game’s offline-friendly feel.

The old Wardle source approach

If you are playing a clone or archived version of the original 2021 Wardle build, the answer list is hardcoded in the JavaScript. Open DevTools, find the main bundle in the Sources tab, search for the array La (or sometimes Ma, depending on the build), and you will find the daily solution list indexed by day count from launch.

Method 2: Visit a spoiler hint site

Several established sites post the day’s Wordle answer along with progressive hints. The Tom’s Guide daily Wordle hint page, WordleBot (paywalled), and a few others all publish the answer behind a “click to reveal” gate. This is the easiest path if you are not interested in clicking around in DevTools. Search for “today’s Wordle answer” and you will find ten of these within the first three results.

The hint-gradient sites are the more graceful option. They give you the first letter, then the vowel count, then the part of speech, then a definition, and only at the bottom — usually after a long scroll — the answer itself. This lets you peek as little as you need to.

Method 3: The unofficial Wordle archive

Several fan-run sites maintain databases of every past Wordle answer with the date attached. These are how to find yesterday’s word, or last Tuesday’s, or the one from your birthday. The NYT has not officially released a historical archive, but the answer list since the game’s January 2022 acquisition is well-documented across multiple sources. For the same reason as Method 1, the answers are public the moment they go live.

What is no longer the right answer source

A few methods have stopped working as Wordle has moved through ownership changes. The original Wardle git repository on GitHub still has the original word list, but that list diverged from the NYT’s curated version after the acquisition. The Times removed some words (deemed too obscure or too sensitive), added some new ones, and reordered the schedule. The original repo will tell you what the answer would have been; the NYT API tells you what it actually is.

The ethical position

None of the above methods are illegal. None of them require breaking anything. The NYT publishes the answer client-side by necessity. Spoiler sites publish freely. The information is public the moment the puzzle is live.

The ethics question is internal. If your goal is to maintain a daily streak that you treat as personally meaningful, looking up the answer makes the streak meaningless to you. If your goal is to enjoy the puzzle, looking up the answer removes the puzzle. If your goal is purely social — getting a low share number to post in the group chat — looking it up is a small lie to your friends. Only you know if any of those matter for your version of playing.

A better alternative: opening word strategy

If you are looking up answers because you keep failing, the actual fix is your opening words. The best starters cover the most common English letters: STARE, CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU, and AUDIO all show up in serious players’ rotations because they front-load vowels and high-frequency consonants. WordleBot’s analysis after each daily puzzle shows that two well-chosen openers can narrow the answer to single digits before guess three. Our starting words guide goes deeper. For the algorithmic underpinnings, our Wordle algorithm piece covers the entropy math.

If you need a five-minute palate cleanser

Wordle is a five-minute game. So is the Chrome Dino game, which has the opposite design philosophy: no daily commitment, no answer to look up, just jump over cacti until you fail. When you are done with today’s word, that endless runner is one tab away.

Frequently asked questions

Is finding today’s Wordle answer cheating?

Technically no — there is no rule against it and no enforcement mechanism. Practically yes — the entire game is the constraint of not knowing. Looking up the answer is allowed; it just makes the activity stop being Wordle in any meaningful sense.

Where does the NYT store the daily Wordle answer?

The answer is served from the NYT Games API at a path like /svc/wordle/v2/YYYY-MM-DD.json. The response contains the day’s solution in plain text. Any DevTools Network tab will show it during page load.

Can I see yesterday’s Wordle answer?

The NYT does not host an official archive, but fan-maintained answer lists track every past word with its date. Several Wordle hint sites also keep a “previous answers” section. The information is widely documented since the January 2022 NYT acquisition.

Does looking up the answer break my streak?

Not technically. The NYT tracks streaks based on whether you submit a correct guess, regardless of how you got there. A looked-up answer counts. The streak you are protecting just means something different than it did before.

Is there a way to play without spoiling myself?

Yes — close this tab, open the NYT Wordle page, and play. Avoid social media until you have finished. The puzzle takes most players three to five minutes. The temptation to peek is real, and skipping it is the whole game.

The bottom line

The day’s Wordle answer is sitting in your browser the moment the page loads. You can read it from the API, a spoiler site, or a fan archive. None of those routes is hidden or hard. The harder thing is choosing not to. Wordle is one of the few internet artifacts that asks for nothing except your willingness to not know the answer for a few minutes. That is the whole appeal. Spend the five minutes guessing badly instead. You will feel better afterward, and tomorrow’s puzzle will still be there.