Wordle Answer Today — Daily Solution & Archive

The Wordle answer for November 2, 2026 is SCOOT. Four guesses, and the part worth reading is not the word — it is the third row, which came back with exactly the same colours as the second row and still did nearly all of the remaining work.

What follows is the whole chain: what each guess was testing, what the tiles actually ruled out, and how the field went from 2,316 possible words to one. The board was played on our own free daily Wordle, so the tiles in the screenshots are the tiles you would see if you opened it yourself.

Before the full reveal: the answer starts with S, ends with T, and exactly one letter appears twice. That narrows the field a long way without handing over the word. The reasoning is below.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

The answer was SCOOT, solved in 4 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  🟩⬛⬛🟨⬛
STOUT  🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩
SHORT  🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩
SCOOT  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

One note on the numbers before we go further. The pool we track is 2,316 words: the widely used 2,315-word answer list plus today's word, because SCOOT postdates that snapshot. Treat 2,316 as the starting field for this puzzle, not 2,315.

By the end of the second row the board had already given up the skeleton: position 1 is S, position 3 is O, position 5 is T. A five-letter word shaped S _ O _ T, holding exactly one T and no U, is a very short list. The only letter in the final answer that no probe row ever tested was C.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,316 candidates down to 46

SLATE is a standard opener for good reasons: five common letters, all distinct, three consonants sitting in useful slots.

• S came back green. Position 1 is S.
• L, A and E came back grey. The answer has no unclaimed copies of those letters.
• T came back yellow at position 4. T is in the word, but not in the fourth slot.

That is five tiles of real information: one position pinned, three letters removed from consideration, one letter confirmed present with a slot excluded. The field fell from 2,316 to 46 — roughly a 50x cut on the first row.

The trap is reading three grey tiles as "this must be an unusual word". It is not. It only means the answer is built from what is left, and plenty of ordinary five-letter words are built from what is left.

Guess 2: STOUT — 46 candidates down to 5

With S pinned at the front and T confirmed but unplaced, the next job was to place T and probe two fresh vowels. STOUT did both, and produced the most instructive row of the day.

• S green again, confirming position 1.
• T at position 2 grey.
• O green at position 3. Position 3 is O.
• U grey. Removed.
• T at position 5 green. Position 5 is T.

Look at the two T tiles: one grey, one green, same letter, same row. That is not a glitch. SLATE had already established that the answer holds exactly one T, so once the T at position 5 claims it, the T at position 2 has nothing left to claim and goes grey. A player who reads grey as "T is not in the word" would have thrown the answer away three rows early.

The row also closed the skeleton: S at 1, O at 3, T at 5. Five words still fit.

Guess 3: SHORT — 5 candidates down to 1

This is the odd part of the day. SHORT produced the same colour pattern as STOUT — green, grey, green, grey, green — and collapsed the field from five words to one.

The rows look the same because the same three positions went green. They carry different information because the letters in the grey slots are different. STOUT had tested U, which was already gone. SHORT tested H and R, and both came back grey, which removed every remaining candidate containing either letter.

• S, O and T green, as expected — the skeleton held.
• H and R grey. Both gone.

Five candidates in, one survivor out. Same picture, entirely different news.

Guess 4: SCOOT — confirmation

With one candidate standing, the row is not really a guess. SCOOT came back all green and the puzzle was done in four.

Note what the answer looks like next to the clues: S pinned on row one, O and T pinned on row two, then the second O and the C filled in at the end. C was the one letter no probe had touched — which is what tends to happen when a pool shrinks to a single candidate before you have spent a row on every letter.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things are worth pulling out of that table.

First, the biggest cut came from the greys, not the green. The single green tile in row one said where S lives; the three grey tiles said which letters to stop thinking about, and that is where most of the 2,316 went.

Second, the pool never stalled. Each row more than halved what was left: about 50x, then about 9x, then 5x. A row that cuts the field by less than half is usually a row spent on confirmation rather than information — fine when you are nearly home, expensive when you are not.

Third, the flat tail is correct behaviour, not waste. Once one candidate remains, "1 to 1" means the answer is known and the last row only proves it. The funnel has already done its job.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Most Wordle confusion comes from one misreading of grey tiles. A grey tile does not mean the letter is missing from the answer. It means the answer has no copies of that letter left unclaimed.

Today's second row is the clean demonstration. STOUT holds two Ts. One landed on the answer's single T and turned green; the other came back grey, because the answer's supply of T had already been spent by the green tile. Same letter, two colours, one row. That is the rule working in plain sight.

The bookkeeping runs in two passes, and it is worth doing explicitly:

1. Mark every position that matches the answer exactly as green, and take those letters out of the answer's remaining inventory.
2. For every position still unmarked, mark yellow if the guess letter still has inventory left in the answer; otherwise grey.

Read grey as a quantity rather than a presence and every tile becomes a statement about counts. That is the entire filtering engine; the rest is choosing which word to spend next.

On choosing: score each candidate by how often its letters appear in each position across the surviving field, weight the positional part heavily, add a small bonus for distinct-letter coverage. Position beats presence. That is why SLATE is a strong opener, and why STOUT and SHORT — neither of which anyone would submit as an answer — were the right rows to spend. Probe words are not supposed to look like answers.

The academic work on the game reaches the same conclusion. Professor Nir Oren at the University of Aberdeen's School of Natural and Computing Sciences has shown that a strong opener plus disciplined follow-up locates the target in three to four moves. A Binghamton University team formalises the same intuition with information entropy. And Floyd Peiszan's bachelor's thesis at the University of Basel puts entropy-based play at an average of 3.43 guesses, within about 1% of optimal. None of that depends on a lucky guess; it depends on counting.

What You Can Take Away

Three habits from today's chain carry over to any Wordle day.

Treat grey as a count, not an absence. The moment a green tile claims a letter, every other copy of that letter in the same row is grey by construction. Holding that in mind stops the "why is this T grey when T is right there" confusion, and it stops you deleting words that legitimately repeat a letter.

Spend early rows on probe words. STOUT and SHORT are not plausible answers to anything, and they were still the two best rows of the day: between them they tested four letters the opener had left alone — O, U, H and R — and closed the S _ O _ T skeleton. Early rows buy information; late rows spend it.

Track position exclusions, not just letter presence. T was known to be somewhere from the first row. It took a second row to force it into position 5, and knowing "T is not position 4" was as valuable as knowing "T is in the word". Letter-level notes leave candidates alive; position-level notes kill them.

If you want to play the same board or see how it compares with earlier days, the Wordle game page and the daily answer archive both run free, with no sign-up and unlimited replays.