Wordle Answer 1 December 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for December 1, 2026 is SAUCE. Four rows to solve it, and the board tells two stories at once: a frame that was finished on the very first guess and never moved, and a single yellow tile that sat in the same wrong seat three times running before anyone thought to move it.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 1 dec 2026: every guess, what each tile established, and how the field fell from 2,315 possible words to one. The chain was produced by running the puzzle's own two-pass scoring engine against the official answer list, so every tile here is reproducible rather than remembered.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

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

SLATE  🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
SHARE  🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
SPACE  🟩⬛🟨🟩🟩
SAUCE  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,991, a Tuesday board and the first one December gets. Sauce — the stuff poured over food, and by extension the attitude somebody brings to a room. The solve never had to search for the ends of the word; both ends were handed over in row 1 and simply stayed put. All the work was in the middle three seats.

SAUCE sits inside the official 2,315-word answer snapshot, so the field opened at exactly 2,315 candidates.

Read the board vertically before you read the chain. Column 1 is green in all four rows. Column 5 is green in all four rows. Column 3 is yellow in the first three rows — the same tile, the same seat, three separate guesses — and then green in the last one. A board that repeats a tile in the same column three times is not giving you three pieces of information. It is giving you one piece of information three times.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Four rows, each one the highest-value row available when it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 14

SLATE came back 🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩.

• S green at position 1. First seat locked.
• L grey. Removed.
• A yellow at position 3. The word holds an A, but not in the third seat.
• T grey. Removed.
• E green at position 5. Last seat locked.

Two greens and a yellow on the opening row, and the field fell from 2,315 to 14. Both ends of the word were settled immediately — S on the left, E on the right — which left exactly three unknown seats and a very short list of words that could fill them. Fourteen candidates is a good place to be after one guess; it is also a dangerous place, because every candidate you can still see is a word that fits the same frame.

Guess 2: SHARE — 14 down to 5

SHARE returned 🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩.

• S green at position 1. Holding.
• H grey. Removed.
• A yellow at position 3. The A rejected from the third seat a second time.
• R grey. Removed.
• E green at position 5. Holding.

The frame held and the list halved and then some — 14 to 5 — but look at what that row actually bought. Two letters, H and R, both dead. The A was tested in the very seat it had already failed in, so its yellow tile added nothing to what row 1 had said. The row was a letter-hunt dressed up as a guess.

Guess 3: SPACE — 5 down to 1

SPACE returned 🟩⬛🟨🟩🟩, and this is the row that ended the puzzle.

• S green at position 1. Holding.
• P grey. A brand-new letter, tested once, dead.
• A yellow at position 3. The third rejection from the same seat.
• C green at position 4. The breakthrough — a letter no earlier row had contained, landing green on its first appearance.
• E green at position 5. Holding.

Four green tiles at once, and the field dropped from 5 straight to 1. The C did the work: with seats 1, 4 and 5 locked and an A that could not live in seat 3, only one word in the list fit. Compare the cost of the two rows — row 2 spent a whole guess to remove two letters and left 5 candidates; row 3 spent one guess on a pair of unseen letters and removed 4 candidates while painting three greens.

Guess 4: SAUCE — the last row

One candidate left, and the board turned entirely green.

The A finally moved into seat 2 — the only seat it had never been tested in — and the U, a letter that had not appeared on the board in any form until this row, completed the middle. Three rows of rejections and one rearrangement, and the frame that row 1 built was still standing at the end.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the frame. Two greens on the opening row, at the two ends, cut 2,315 candidates to 14 in a single move. End seats are the cheapest information on the board: a word's first and last letters prune the list harder than any middle position, because so many candidates differ precisely there.

Second, the wasted second row. SHARE's only contribution was killing H and R. It spent a full guess and moved the count from 14 to 5 while re-testing a letter — the A — in a seat that had already rejected it. Had that row carried two unseen letters instead of one, the solve might well have ended a row earlier.

Third, the stranger. C had never appeared on the board before row 3, and it came back green in the fourth seat on its first try. P, the other new letter in that row, died instantly. One fresh letter placed, one removed, and the puzzle was over — that is what a probe row looks like when it works.

Why a Yellow in the Same Seat Three Times Is One Fact, Not Three

A yellow tile carries two separate pieces of news: the letter is in the word, and that particular seat is not its home. The first yellow you see tells you both. Every subsequent yellow for the same letter in the same seat tells you neither — it restates the rejection you already own.

This board stacked three of them in column 3. Taken as three facts, they feel like progress; taken correctly, they are one fact and two wasted rows of pressure on a decision that was already made. The A was never going to appear in seat 3. The only open question was where it would appear, and answering that requires moving it — not testing it again.

There is a useful habit here. When a letter comes back yellow, your next row should either place that letter somewhere new or ignore it entirely and spend the row on unseen letters. What it should not do is park the letter in the seat that has already refused it. Both moves — relocation and reconnaissance — produce information. Repetition produces a tile you have seen before.

The same logic applies to green: a green tile is settled, so a later row that repeats a green is spending a seat to confirm something you know. Every row in a Wordle game has five seats of budget and you should be paying for something new in as many of them as possible.

What You Can Take Away

End seats prune hardest. SLATE locked S and E at the two ends and cut 2,315 candidates to 14 in one row.

A repeated yellow is a repeated fact. The A was refused from seat 3 in three straight rows; the answer had it in seat 2 the whole time.

Spend rows on unseen letters. C appeared for the first time in row 3 and went green immediately — that is what bought the solve.

Move the letter, don't re-test it. Once a seat is rejected, the productive next step is a new seat for that letter, not the same seat again.

If you want to play the December 1 board yourself, or work back through the ones you missed, the Wordle game page and the daily answer archive are both free and need no sign-up.