Wordle Answer 12 November 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 12, 2026 is KARAT. Four rows, and the third of them came back with four green tiles and still was not the answer — which makes this board a clean lesson in what a green tile actually promises and what it does not.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 12 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile ruled out, and how the field fell from 2,316 possible words to one. Every row was produced by running the puzzle's own two-pass scoring against the official answer list, so the tiles are reproducible rather than reconstructed after the fact.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

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

SLATE  ⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛
TAINT  ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
CARAT  ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
KARAT  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,972, a Thursday board. Karat is the measure of gold purity — 24 karat is pure gold — and it is a homophone of carat, the weight unit for gemstones. Two words, one sound, one letter of difference. Keep that in mind, because it is exactly the shape of this puzzle's last two rows.

KARAT postdates the 2022 snapshot of 2,315 answers, so the field opened at 2,316 candidates rather than 2,315.

The shape of the board is worth a look before the walkthrough. Row one scatters two yellows across the middle. Row two converts both of them into greens in different seats. Row three turns four tiles green at once. Row four is the receipt.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Four rows, each one the highest-scoring candidate available when it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,316 down to 87

SLATE came back ⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛.

• A yellow at position 3. The word holds an A, but not in that seat.
• T yellow at position 4. Same story: a T exists, somewhere else.
• S, L and E grey. Zero remaining copies of each.

Two yellows and nothing placed, yet the pool collapsed from 2,316 to 87. That is the useful thing about vowels in the middle of an opener: A is so common that a yellow on it barely narrows anything by itself, but combined with the death of S, L and E — three of the most frequent letters in the language — it removes huge classes of candidates at once.

Eighty-seven words left, and not one of them had a single letter in a confirmed seat.

Guess 2: TAINT — 87 down to 5

TAINT returned ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩 — and this is the row worth reading twice, because the word contains two T's and only one of them is green.

• A green at position 2. The first placement of the day.
• T green at position 5. The tail is locked.
• T grey at position 1. The second T, and it is grey.
• I and N grey. Both retired.

A green T and a grey T in the same row is the counting rule in plain sight. The answer holds one T. The green tile at position 5 claims that single copy; by the time the scan reaches position 1, the inventory is empty, so that tile goes grey — not because the word has no T, but because the T it has is already accounted for four seats to the right.

Five candidates survived. The pool had gone from 87 to 5 on the strength of two placements and three eliminations.

Guess 3: CARAT — 5 down to 1

CARAT came back ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩.

• A green at position 2.
• R green at position 3. A new letter, correct on its first appearance.
• A green at position 4. The second A, exactly where the earlier yellow suggested one might be.
• T green at position 5.
• C grey at position 1.

Four green tiles from position 2 to position 5. The answer now reads _ A R A T, with the first letter known to be something other than C. One candidate was left in the pool: KARAT.

Notice what the row did in one move. Everything the previous two rows had established as yellow was, in a single guess, replayed in the correct seats — and the only thing left unknown was the letter nobody had tested.

Guess 4: KARAT — the last row

One candidate standing, and the board came back all green.

The interesting part is the first letter. K was never guessed on any row — it was not in SLATE, not in TAINT, not in CARAT. It arrived on the answer row without ever being tested. That is not a lucky guess; it is the ceiling of what filtering can do. Once the pool is down to one word, the unknown letter stops being a question and becomes a consequence.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did the heavy lifting in raw volume and almost none of it in placement. 2,316 to 87 is a collapse of a different order than anything that followed, and it was bought entirely with kills — S, L and E out, A and T merely present.

Second, the second row was the efficient one. Two greens in two seats at once is what separates a good second guess from a wasted one, and it is the only reason the pool reached single digits by row two.

Third, the third row looked like a finish and was only a narrowing. Four green tiles out of five reads like success; the missing fifth tile was, for one row, the entire remaining problem.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

TAINT is the teaching row today: a guess can contain a letter twice while the answer contains it once, and the tiles will show you exactly that.

A grey tile means the answer has zero unclaimed copies of that letter. Unclaimed — that is the operative word. Greens take their share first, then yellow claims what is left, and only then does anything remaining turn grey.

The bookkeeping runs in two passes:

1. Mark every position that matches the answer as green, and remove those letters from the answer's inventory.
2. For every position still unmarked, mark yellow if the guess letter still has inventory left, otherwise grey.

Run TAINT through it and the row resolves cleanly: the answer's single T is claimed by the green at position 5, leaving nothing for the position 1 T, which goes grey. There is no contradiction in the row — only a count.

That same rule is what makes the filter work. A green locks a position. A yellow demands that any surviving candidate contain at least as many copies of that letter as have been declared. A grey caps the count at the number already declared — which, after a green has spoken, can be one. A board full of greys is therefore informative rather than discouraging: each grey is a capped quantity, not a vague absence.

And the rule has a second face today, in the last two rows. CARAT and KARAT differ in exactly one letter. Four greens told us four seats; the grey told us the fifth seat was not C. A single grey did as much work as the four greens beside it, because it was the only tile still carrying information.

What You Can Take Away

A yellow is a letter, not a seat. Row one's A and T were both in the word and both in the wrong place. It took a second row to convert them into placements, and a third row to place the second A. Yellow is a promise about the inventory, not about the position.

A green and a grey can describe the same letter. TAINT looks contradictory at a glance — one T green, one T grey. It is not. It is an inventory statement: one T exists, and it is at the end.

Four greens is not four-fifths of an answer. CARAT had four correct letters and was still not the answer. The remaining fifth is a full search problem on its own — and here the search was solved by a grey tile rather than by a guess.

Sometimes a letter is never guessed. K appeared only on the winning row. When the candidate pool is squeezed to a single word, elimination does the work that guessing usually does.

If you want to play the November 12 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.