Wordle Answer 14 November 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 14, 2026 is RANDY. Four rows — and the board's most interesting detail is that the same letter, in the same seat, was grey on one row and yellow on the next.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 14 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile ruled out, and how the field fell from 2,315 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 RANDY, solved in 4 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
CARRY  ⬛🟩🟨⬛🟩
HAIRY  ⬛🟩⬛🟨🟩
RANDY  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,974, a Saturday board. Randy is a familiar English given name, and an older adjective meaning loud, boisterous, full of life — a word that shows up in Scottish and Irish writing and in the occasional character description.

RANDY sits inside the official 2,315-word answer list, so today's field opened at exactly 2,315 candidates.

Look at the last two rows before the answer. Both have A in the second seat and Y in the fifth. Both have an R somewhere — but CARRY shows it grey at position 4, and HAIRY shows it yellow at position 4. Same letter, same seat, different colour. That is not a glitch. It is the counting rule, and it is the best thing on this board.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

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

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 184

SLATE came back ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛.

• A yellow at position 3. The word holds an A, but not in that seat.
• S, L, T and E grey. Zero remaining copies of each.

One yellow and four greys, and the pool fell from 2,315 to 184. That is worth pausing on: a single confirmed letter is usually a weak result, but the four that died — S, T, E and L — are among the most common letters in the language. Removing them does more work than placing one vowel does.

What the row did not say is where the A belongs. It only said "not position 3", which leaves three other seats open.

Guess 2: CARRY — 184 down to 7

CARRY returned ⬛🟩🟨⬛🟩.

• A green at position 2. The yellow from row one converted into a placement.
• Y green at position 5. The tail locked.
• R yellow at position 3. The word contains an R, not in that seat.
• R grey at position 4. The second R, and it is grey.
• C grey at position 1.

Two greens in one row is the efficient move, and it took the pool from 184 to 7. But the row is worth reading twice for the two R's: position 3 yellow, position 4 grey. CARRY contains two R's; the answer contains one. The yellow at position 3 claims that single copy, so by the time the scan reaches position 4 the inventory is empty and that tile goes grey. Not because the word has no R — because the R it has is already spoken for four seats to the left.

Guess 3: HAIRY — 7 down to 1

HAIRY came back ⬛🟩⬛🟨🟩.

• A green at position 2. Holding.
• Y green at position 5. Holding.
• R yellow at position 4. And here is the contrast: grey in the row above, yellow in this one.
• H grey at position 1.
• I grey at position 3.

Seven candidates to one. Two greys and one yellow, and the pool closed.

The R at position 4 changed colour because HAIRY carries only one R. In CARRY, the earlier R at position 3 had already taken the answer's only copy, so position 4 had nothing left to claim. In HAIRY there is no earlier R to take it, so position 4 speaks for the letter itself and turns yellow. Same seat, same answer, opposite verdict — because the colour depends on the whole row, not on the tile in isolation.

That single yellow was also the last thing needed. Between the seven survivors, an R that is not at position 4 and a word of the shape _ A _ _ Y left exactly one candidate.

Guess 4: RANDY — the last row

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

Look at where the R finally sat: position 1. It had been tried at position 3, then at position 4, and it was correct in neither. The only seat it had never been offered was the one it occupied.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener traded placement for elimination and it paid. One yellow, four kills, 2,315 down to 184 — a loss of more than nine words in every ten, bought without knowing a single position.

Second, the second row did two jobs at once. It placed the A, locked the Y, confirmed an R and killed C. Rows like that are what turn a wide-open board into a seven-word shortlist.

Third, the board finished on a yellow, not a green. HAIRY's only positive contribution was an R that was still in the wrong seat — and that was enough, because at seven candidates a single exclusion is decisive.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Today's board contains a direct experiment. CARRY and HAIRY both put R at position 4. The answer RANDY has one R, at position 1. CARRY scored that tile grey. HAIRY scored it yellow.

The only difference is how many R's each guess contains. A tile's colour is computed against the answer's inventory, and greens spend that inventory first. 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 CARRY: position 3 gets yellow and takes the answer's only R off the shelf; position 4 then finds nothing and goes grey. Run HAIRY: there is only one R, it is not at the right seat, so it goes yellow — nothing was spent before it.

The consequence is the thing most players get wrong. A grey tile does not mean the letter is absent from the answer. It means the answer has zero unclaimed copies left at the moment that tile is scored. A letter can be grey in one row and yellow in the next, and both rows can be telling the truth.

The rest of the engine follows from the same count. A green locks a position. A yellow sets a minimum: any surviving candidate must contain at least as many copies of that letter as have been declared. A grey sets a maximum: no more copies than have already been declared. Every tile is a constraint of one of those three kinds, which is why even a row of four greys is a row that did real work.

What You Can Take Away

Grey is a count, not an absence. The R was in the answer the whole time. CARRY's grey tile at position 4 was not wrong; it was answering a narrower question than it looked like it was answering.

A repeated letter can only speak once. If your guess has two copies of a letter and the answer has one, the earlier copy takes the inventory and the later one goes grey. Read such rows as "one copy, not here" rather than "this letter is dead".

Two greens in a row beats one green and three kills — sometimes. Here the two greens took the pool from 184 to 7, but the opener's four greys had already done the heavier lifting. The useful habit is to notice which kind of row you are on, then spend the next guess on the other kind.

Move the yellow. The R was tested at position 3, then position 4, and only worked at position 1 — the one seat it had never been given. A yellow that comes back yellow has told you the seat is wrong; the next guess should test a different one.

If you want to play the November 14 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.