Wordle Answer 20 November 2026 (Solved in 5 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 20, 2026 is AROSE. Five rows — and from the second row onward, four of them were built from the same four letters, with one new letter added each time. The answer was the last of those five-letter arrangements.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 20 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile eliminated, and how the field fell from 2,315 possible words to one. The chain was produced by running the puzzle's own two-pass scoring against the official answer list, so every tile here is reproducible rather than remembered.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

The answer was AROSE, solved in 5 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  🟨⬛🟨⬛🟩
SHARE  🟨⬛🟨🟨🟩
ERASE  ⬛🟩🟨🟩🟩
ARISE  🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
AROSE  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,980, a Friday board. Arose is the past tense of arise — to come up, to come into being — and it is also, read as two words, the arrangement this board spent five rows assembling.

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

Read the last column first: E is green on all five rows. The opener placed it, and nothing after that ever questioned it. Now read the last four rows as words rather than as boards. SHARE, ERASE, ARISE, AROSE — each one contains A, R, S and E, and each one adds a single extra letter: H, then E, then I, then O. Four rows, the same skeleton, four different passengers in the one seat that was still in play.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Five rows, each one the highest-value row available when it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 30

SLATE came back 🟨⬛🟨⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5. Placed on the first row, and correct on every row after it.
• S yellow at position 1. The word holds an S, not in the first seat.
• A yellow at position 3. The word holds an A, not in the third seat.
• L and T grey. Neither is in the answer.

Two yellows, one green, two kills, and 2,315 words became 30. This is a much softer opener than a three-grey one — the answer holds three of the five letters that were offered, so only two were eliminated and the board had to work seat by seat instead. Thirty candidates is still a shortlist rather than a search, but it is a shortlist that will need more than one row to break.

Guess 2: SHARE — 30 down to 8

SHARE returned 🟨⬛🟨🟨🟩.

• E green at position 5. Holding.
• S yellow at position 1. Second row, same verdict as the first.
• A yellow at position 3. Second row, same verdict.
• R yellow at position 4. The word holds an R, not in the fourth seat.
• H grey. Dead.

Thirty to eight, and the row's real contribution is the R. With S, A, R and E all confirmed present, the answer was known to be built from those four letters plus one that the board had not yet identified. Eight words still fit.

Guess 3: ERASE — 8 down to 2

ERASE came back ⬛🟩🟨🟩🟩.

• R green at position 2. The yellow R from row two, moved one seat left, is now placed.
• S green at position 4. The S that had been yellow at position 1 on two consecutive rows is now placed, three seats to the right.
• E green at position 5. Third row holding.
• A yellow at position 3. Third row in that seat, third time yellow.
• The second E grey at position 1.

This is the row that decides the puzzle, and it does it twice over. First the placements: three seats are now locked — R at position 2, S at position 4, E at position 5. Then the deductions. A is in the answer and cannot be at position 3, and positions 2, 4 and 5 are taken, so A has only one seat left: position 1. And the grey E at position 1 confirms it independently, because ERASE carries two E's and the green copy at position 5 has already spent the answer's single E.

Eight down to 2, and the two survivors are the same word with a different middle letter.

Guess 4: ARISE — 2 down to 1

ARISE came back 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩.

• A green at position 1. The letter that had been yellow at position 3 for three straight rows, finally offered where it belonged.
• R green at position 2, S green at position 4, E green at position 5. All holding.
• I grey at position 3.

Four greens and one grey, and the grey is the whole result. The only open seat on the board was position 3, and the two remaining candidates differed in exactly that seat — one with an I, one with an O. The I came back dead, which leaves the O, which leaves one word.

Worth pausing on how narrow this was. ARISE and AROSE are the same five letters in the same four seats, and differ by a single vowel. A board this close to finished can still be decided by one tile, and this one was.

Guess 5: AROSE — the last row

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

The O went into the only seat that had been open, between the R and the S, and the five rows closed. Five rows of six, one to spare.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, this was not a one-row collapse. The opener removed most of the field but left 30 candidates, and every row after it had to do real work — 30 to 8, 8 to 2, 2 to 1. A board where the opener does everything finishes fast; a board where four letters are all present at once takes a row per seat.

Second, the placements came late and then all at once. Row one placed E. Rows two and three placed R and S. By the end of row three, three seats were locked and a fourth was forced by elimination — four of five seats settled in three rows.

Third, the last two decisions were made on single tiles. Row four eliminated one vowel to choose between two words. That is what a tightly constrained board looks like at the end: not a search, just a confirmation.

Why the Grey E on ERASE Did the Most Work

Row three contains five tiles, and three of them are green. The tile that actually solved the puzzle is the grey one.

ERASE has two E's. The copy at position 5 came back green; the copy at position 1 came back grey. Both tiles are correct, and the explanation is the same counting rule that governs every board:

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

AROSE holds a single E, at position 5. The first pass finds it there, turns it green, and takes the answer's one E off the shelf. The second pass then reaches position 1, which also holds an E, and finds the shelf empty. Grey.

So a grey tile is never a claim that the letter is missing from the word in general. What it records is narrower: at the moment that tile is scored, the answer has zero unclaimed copies of the letter left. That can happen because the letter is genuinely absent, or because an earlier tile in the same row already spent the copy. On this board it was the second case, and the grey carried information no green could: position 1 does not hold an E. Combined with A being ruled out of position 3, that forced A into position 1 and settled the board down to two candidates.

That is the useful habit to take from today. When your guess repeats a letter and one copy is green while the other is grey, read the pair as a statement about quantity and seat at the same time — there is one copy, and here is where it lives. Then check whether the grey has quietly eliminated a seat somewhere else.

What You Can Take Away

A yellow that repeats is a seat you have not tried. A was yellow at position 3 on three consecutive rows and green at position 1 on the fourth. The letter was never in doubt; the placement was. When a yellow comes back yellow, move the letter instead of doubting it.

An opener that leaves four letters alive is not a bad opener. Thirty candidates after row one is a slower start than nine, but it also means the answer's letter set was nearly known. Slower collapses often mean fewer total rows, not more.

A doubled letter in your guess is a free experiment. ERASE tested E twice and returned one green and one grey, which ruled out a seat no other tile could have ruled out. Deliberate repetition is a legitimate probe.

Near-anagrams are the hardest endgame. ARISE and AROSE share four seats and differ by one vowel. When you are down to a pair like that, the remaining row is not a formality — it is the whole puzzle.

If you want to play the November 20 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.