Wordle Answer 13 November 2026 (Solved in 5 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 13, 2026 is MOXIE. The last letter of the answer was green on the very first row, and it still took five rows to finish — which says most of what there is to say about this board.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 13 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 MOXIE, solved in 5 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
PRICE  ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩
BINGE  ⬛🟨⬛⬛🟩
MOVIE  🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
MOXIE  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,973, a Friday board. Moxie is American informal for nerve, grit, the willingness to take a swing — the word traces back to a soft-drink brand whose advertising made it a synonym for pluck. Nobody says it in a formal meeting; plenty of people say it about someone they admire.

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

Read the board by column and the story is obvious. The fifth column is green from row one to row five. Everything to its left spends three rows refusing to settle, then resolves almost all at once.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

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

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,316 down to 108

SLATE came back ⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5. The tail locked on row one.
• S, L, A and T grey. Zero remaining copies of each.

That is an unusual opener result. Four grey tiles is normally a discouraging row, but here it killed A and T — two of the letters an opener is supposed to harvest — and it left an E anchored at the end. The pool fell from 2,316 to 108.

Note what did not happen: no vowel other than E was confirmed, and nothing about positions one through four was known. A green at the end of a word tells you how the word finishes; it says nothing about how it starts.

Guess 2: PRICE — 108 down to 14

PRICE returned ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5. Holding.
• I yellow at position 3. A second vowel confirmed, in the wrong seat.
• P, R and C grey. Three consonants retired in one row.

The pool dropped to 14. Two vowels now accounted for, and the second of them already known to be misplaced.

Guess 3: BINGE — 14 down to 4

BINGE came back ⬛🟨⬛⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5.
• I yellow at position 2. Third seat for the same vowel; still wrong.
• B, N and G grey.

Fourteen candidates to four. Progress, but slower — and the row is worth criticising on one point. I had already been refused at position 3. Replaying it at position 2 is a legitimate test, since a vowel can only sit in four seats, but it spends a whole row learning one bit.

What the row did buy was consonants: B, N and G all dead, which is a large slice of the letters still available to finish a five-letter word.

Guess 4: MOVIE — 4 down to 1

MOVIE returned 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩.

• M green at position 1.
• O green at position 2.
• I green at position 4. The wandering vowel finally lands.
• E green at position 5.
• V grey at position 3.

Four greens and one grey. The answer reads M O _ I E, and the only letter still in question is the middle one.

This is the row that decided the puzzle, and it is the most interesting row on the board — because MOVIE was not the answer the solver expected. Four candidates remained, and the top-ranked one was MOXIE itself. Instead of playing it, the solver spent a probe that tested a different middle letter. The probe came back with four greens, which is the best possible outcome short of winning: it collapsed the field from 4 to 1 and left nothing for the last row to do but confirm.

That is a deliberate trade — one guaranteed guess spent on information rather than on the answer — and it only works when the candidate pool is already small. With four words left, a probe that hits four greens is nearly as good as a win, because it converts four possibilities into one.

Guess 5: MOXIE — the last row

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

Note the middle letter: X was never guessed on any row. It was not in SLATE, PRICE, BINGE or MOVIE. It arrived on the answer row untested, carried in by elimination rather than by search.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opening row was a classification row, not a placement row. It killed four letters and anchored one, and it took the pool down by a factor of roughly twenty while telling us almost nothing about the shape of the word.

Second, the middle of the board is where the board slowed down. 108 to 14 to 4: each row roughly divided the field by a smaller number than the row before it, which is what happens when consecutive guesses test overlapping letters instead of fresh ones. PRICE and BINGE both carried an I and an E; the E was already placed, so the only new information either row could deliver was the I.

Third, the last real decision was not a guess at all. MOVIE was chosen to gather information, and it happened to gather almost all of it. That is the difference between a board that ends in five rows and a board that ends in six.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

The I on this board is the teaching example: a yellow tile is a statement about a letter, never about a seat.

PRICE put I at position 3 and got yellow. BINGE put I at position 2 and got yellow again. MOVIE put I at position 4 and got green. Three rows, three seats, one vowel — and only the third attempt produced a placement. Yellow means "the word contains this letter, and not here". It is a location denial, not a location hint.

The rest of the engine is the counting rule. A grey tile means the answer has zero unclaimed copies of that letter, and 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.

That is why SLATE's four greys were so valuable. S, L, A and T were not "letters that felt unlikely"; they were quantities confirmed at zero, and every candidate containing them was deleted outright. A grey is a capped count, not a hunch.

Put the two rules together and the filtering semantics fall out: a green locks a position, a yellow sets a minimum count for that letter, a grey sets a maximum. Every tile on the board constrains the pool in one of those three ways, which is why a row full of grey is still a row that did work.

What You Can Take Away

A green tail is not progress toward the head. E was correct at position 5 from the first row, and rows two through four were spent entirely on the four positions in front of it. Locking a letter tells you where the word ends, not where it goes.

Move the yellow. I was tested at position 3, then position 2, then position 4. The first two rows each bought one bit of information. When a letter comes back yellow in the same seat twice, the seat is the problem, not the letter.

A probe can beat the answer. With four candidates left, the solver played a word that was not on the list of four — and got four greens. Spending a certain guess to buy certainty is only a good trade when the pool is already tiny, but at that size it is usually the best trade available.

Some letters are never guessed. X showed up only on the winning row. When one candidate remains, the untested letter is a conclusion, not a guess.

If you want to play the November 13 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.