Wordle Answer 17 November 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 17, 2026 is ROAST. Four rows — and the story of the board is two letters that spent the whole puzzle in each other's seats.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 17 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 ROAST, solved in 4 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  🟨⬛🟩🟨⬛
START  🟨⬛🟩🟨🟩
SMART  🟨⬛🟩🟨🟩
ROAST  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,977, a Tuesday board. Roast is to cook with dry, circulating heat — and, in the other sense, to subject someone to public ridicule, which is roughly what this board does to anyone who guesses too fast.

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

Read the left edge. S is yellow at position 1 on the first three rows — three identical verdicts on the same letter in the same seat. Then read the fourth seat: R is yellow there on rows two and three. Now look at the answer row. S is at position 4, exactly where R kept failing. R is at position 1, exactly where S kept failing. The two letters did not move; they swapped.

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 20

SLATE came back 🟨⬛🟩🟨⬛.

• A green at position 3. Placed on the first row and never moved again.
• S yellow at position 1. The word holds an S, but not in that seat.
• T yellow at position 4. Likewise: a T, wrong place.
• L and E grey. No unclaimed copies of either.

Two yellows, one green, two kills, and the pool fell from 2,315 to 20 — more than ninety-nine words in every hundred, gone in one row. This is the kind of first row that looks unremarkable and is not: four letters accounted for, one of them placed, and a field narrow enough to inspect by hand.

Guess 2: START — 20 down to 2

START returned 🟨⬛🟩🟨🟩.

• A green at position 3. Holding.
• S yellow at position 1. Same letter, same seat, same answer as row one.
• R yellow at position 4. The word holds an R, not in that seat.
• T green at position 5. The T that was yellow at position 4 in row one now sits green at the end.
• T grey at position 2. The second T, and it is grey.

Two greens and two yellows, twenty down to two, and the row is worth reading twice for the two T's. START contains two T's; the answer contains one. The green at position 5 claims that single copy, so by the time the scan reaches position 2 the inventory is empty and the tile goes grey. Not because the answer lacks a T — because the T it has is already spoken for three seats to the right.

Guess 3: SMART — 2 down to 1

SMART came back 🟨⬛🟩🟨🟩.

• S yellow at position 1. Third time.
• A green, R yellow, T green. All holding.
• M grey at position 2.

Compare this row with the one above it. START and SMART agree in four of five positions — S at 1, A at 3, R at 4, T at 5 — and disagree only at position 2, where T was tried and died, and then M was tried and died. Same shape, same four locked letters, two different letters offered at the one open seat, both eliminated.

This row was also, strictly, a choice. With two candidates left, one of them already ranked highest; typing it would have finished the puzzle a row earlier if it had been right. The row was spent on SMART instead, because a wrong row still divides a shortlist of two, and this was the cleaner split. M died. The survivor was not SMART.

Guess 4: ROAST — the last row

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

And there is the swap. The S that had been sitting at position 1 as a yellow tile for three rows moved to position 4 — the seat where R had been yellow twice. The R that had been failing at position 4 moved to position 1 — the seat where S had been failing since the opener. Both letters were in the answer the whole time. They had simply never been offered in the right order.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did almost everything. 2,315 to 20 in a single row, and the board was effectively decided: twenty words is a shortlist you can reason about, not a field you have to search.

Second, the second row did the placing. Two greens — A in the middle, T at the end — plus an R that turned out to be in the word. That is what took the pool from 20 to 2.

Third, the last real decision was made with a probe rather than a guess at the answer. SMART bought the elimination of M, and the answer then had nothing left to prove. The board finished in four rows of six, with two to spare.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Today's board contains a direct experiment in a single row. START has two T's. The answer ROAST has one. The copy at position 5 came back green; the copy at position 2 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 passes are sequential, so on START the first pass finds a T in the right seat at position 5, turns it green and takes the answer's one T off the shelf. The second pass then reaches position 2, which also holds a T but in the wrong seat, and finds nothing left. 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 green 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 a row of nothing but yellows still does real work.

What You Can Take Away

A yellow that comes back yellow is a placement you have not tried. S sat at position 1 for three rows and was yellow every time. The tile was never wrong; the seat was. When a yellow repeats, move the letter — the row has already told you the rest.

Two letters can be in the answer and still be in the wrong order. Here S and R both appeared early, both kept appearing, and neither was ever offered in the seat it belonged to. A yellow tells you presence. It says nothing about where the letter should go, only where it should not.

The inventory rule explains the odd grey. If your guess repeats a letter and the answer holds one copy, expect one green and one grey. Read that pair as "one copy, and here is where it goes".

A shortlist of two is still two. START left 2 candidates, not 1. The row after it was not a formality — it was the row that decided the puzzle.

If you want to play the November 17 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.