Wordle Answer 16 November 2026 (Solved in 5 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 16, 2026 is DRAWL. Five rows of the six available — and the sharpest detail on the board sits inside a single row, where one letter appears twice and comes back in two different colours.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 16 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile ruled out, and how the field fell from 2,315 possible words to one. Each row comes from 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 DRAWL, solved in 5 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
CLANK  ⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
FLAIL  ⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩
BRAWL  ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
DRAWL  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,976, a Monday board. Drawl is to speak slowly, with the vowels stretched out — the opposite of clipping your words.

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

Look at the third row. FLAIL contains two L's. The copy at position 2 came back grey; the copy at position 5 came back green. Same letter, same row, opposite verdicts. And that grey L is the same L that had been yellow at position 2 in each of the two rows above it. The letter was never lying — the board simply read it twice from a shelf that had one copy on it.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

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

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 31

SLATE came back ⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛.

• A green at position 3. The inner vowel was right on the first row, and it never moved again.
• L yellow at position 2. The word holds an L, but not in that seat.
• S, T and E grey. No unclaimed copies of any of the three.

One green, one yellow, three kills, and the pool fell from 2,315 to 31 — a loss of about ninety-nine words in every hundred. The count is worth noting: two of those tiles did nothing for placement at all, and the row still removed almost the entire field. S, T and E are among the most common letters in the language, and killing them deletes whole families of five-letter words at once.

Guess 2: CLANK — 31 down to 14

CLANK returned ⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛.

• A green at position 3. Holding.
• L yellow at position 2. The same L, offered at the same seat, with the same answer: present, wrong place.
• C, N and K grey.

This row repeated a mistake and still paid. Offering L at position 2 a second time was never going to place it — row one had already ruled that seat out. But the other four tiles did fresh work: three more letters died, and A's green was confirmed rather than assumed. Thirty-one down to 14.

Guess 3: FLAIL — 14 down to 2

FLAIL came back ⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩.

• A green at position 3. Holding for the third row.
• L grey at position 2.
• L green at position 5. The letter finally found its seat — at the far end.
• F and I grey.

Fourteen to two. One row, two copies of one letter, two different colours, and the placement that had been missing since the opener. Note what the grey L at position 2 does not mean: it does not say the answer has no L. The green L at position 5 had already claimed the answer's only copy, so by the time the scan reached position 2 the shelf was empty.

Guess 4: BRAWL — 2 down to 1

BRAWL returned ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩.

• R green at position 2. The seat the L had been failing at for three rows turned out to belong to a different consonant.
• A, W and L green at 3, 4 and 5.
• B grey at position 1.

Four greens, and only the first seat left open. BRAWL was itself one of the two surviving candidates — which makes this the cleanest kind of narrowing there is: the wrong twin stepped forward, showed its four matching letters, lost on the first, and eliminated itself.

Guess 5: DRAWL — the last row

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

The row that finished it also closed the loop on the L: the letter that had been yellow at position 2, then grey at position 2, then green at position 5, ended up right where row three had put it. The fifth row only had to change the first letter.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did the volume and the middle rows did the aim. 2,315 to 31 bought with kills, then a slower grind of 31 to 14 to 2 — the collapse changes character halfway through, and that is normal. Wide boards are won by elimination; narrow boards are won by placement.

Second, the decisive row was the one with the repeated letter. FLAIL placed an L, killed two letters, and closed the field to a pair — all because it offered the same letter twice and let the board report both readings.

Third, the answer arrived on row five of six. One row of slack, which is roughly what an efficiently played board looks like: not a lucky early hit, and not a scramble on the last line.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Today's board contains a direct experiment inside one row. FLAIL has two L's. The answer DRAWL has one. One copy came back green, one came back grey.

The explanation is that a tile's colour is computed against the answer's inventory of that letter, 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.

The two passes are sequential, not interleaved, and that ordering is the whole story. On FLAIL the first pass finds an L in exactly the right seat at position 5 — that tile goes green and takes the answer's one L off the shelf. The second pass then reaches position 2, which also holds an L but in the wrong seat, and finds the shelf already bare. Grey.

The consequence is the thing most players get wrong. A grey tile is not a statement that the answer lacks the letter. It says the answer has zero unclaimed copies left at the moment that tile is scored, which may be because the letter is genuinely absent or because an earlier tile in the same row spent the copy. 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 one of those three constraints, which is why four greys and one yellow can still be a decisive row.

What You Can Take Away

A repeated letter in your guess reads twice as cheaply as it looks. Two copies of one letter can confirm a placement and kill a seat in the same row. On a shortlist of 14, that was the row that ended the search.

Grey next to green is the tell. If you see one copy of a letter green and another grey in the same row, do not conclude the letter is absent. Read it as "one copy, and I have just found where it goes".

Repeating a placement you already know is wrong still costs you. L at position 2 was yellow in row one and yellow again in row two. The second row was still useful, but only because its other four letters were fresh ones.

Four greens can leave two words. BRAWL matched four of five and was wrong. The last open seat is where boards are lost, so test it rather than assuming the first word of that shape that comes to mind.

If you want to play the November 16 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.