Wordle Answer 21 November 2026 (Solved in 3 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 21, 2026 is STENT. Three rows — and the middle one is the story, because it came back with four green tiles and still was not the answer. What solved the board was the tile that did not go green: a yellow E that repeated a verdict the first row had already delivered.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 21 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile eliminated, and how the field fell from 2,316 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 STENT, solved in 3 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  🟩⬛⬛🟨🟨
STONE  🟩🟩⬛🟩🟨
STENT  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,981, a Saturday board. A stent is the small tube surgeons place inside a vessel or passageway to hold it open — and fittingly, this board stayed open for exactly two rows before snapping shut.

STENT is a newer word than the official 2,315-word answer list snapshot, so today's field opened at 2,316 candidates: the 2,315 plus the word itself.

Read row two against row three and you can see the whole puzzle in miniature. STONE matched the answer in four of five seats — S, T and N all green — and the fifth seat is exactly where it lost. Its E came back yellow, which is the same verdict the opener had already returned for that same letter in that same seat. Two rows, the same yellow E at position 5. That repetition, not any green tile, is what picked the word.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Three rows, each one chosen for its information value when it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,316 down to 20

SLATE came back 🟩⬛⬛🟨🟨.

• S green at position 1. Placed on the first row, and never questioned again.
• T yellow at position 4. The word holds a T, not in the fourth seat.
• E yellow at position 5. The word holds an E, not in the fifth seat.
• L and A grey. Neither is in the answer.

One green, two yellows, two kills, and 2,316 words became 20. That is a heavy first row by any standard — twenty candidates is a shortlist, not a search — but note what kind of information it is. Nothing after position 1 was placed. The T and the E were confirmed present and confirmed homeless, which means the remaining twenty words all had to accommodate two letters whose seats were still unknown. Narrow, but not yet decided.

Guess 2: STONE — 20 down to 1

STONE returned 🟩🟩⬛🟩🟨.

• S green at position 1. Holding.
• T green at position 2. The T that had been yellow in row one found its home one seat to the left of where the opener offered it.
• O grey at position 3. Dead — and this matters more than it looks, because it leaves position 3 standing empty.
• N green at position 4. Placed.
• E yellow at position 5. Second row, same seat, same verdict.

Four greens and a yellow, and 20 words became 1. Here is the arithmetic that made it decisive. Three seats were now locked: S at 1, T at 2, N at 4. The grey O cleared position 3 of one more impostor. That left two open seats, 3 and 5, and the yellow E spoke to both of them at once: E is in the word, and E is not at position 5 — a fact the board now held from two independent rows. So E goes to position 3, and position 5 belongs to some letter no row had tested yet.

One candidate fit all of that. It was not STONE — STONE itself is disqualified by its own yellow E, which is the quiet joke of a near-miss row. The survivor was a word that agreed with STONE everywhere except the two open seats, and carried something STONE could not show: a second T, waiting at position 5.

Worth noting how this row came to be played at all. With twenty candidates left, the top-scoring word in the pool was already STENT itself. The solver passed over it and played STONE, a near-equal probe, to keep narrowing the range rather than betting the whole board on one candidate. The gamble cost nothing — the probe happened to be a near-twin of the answer — but on a harder board this is the row where a wrong probe would have spent a turn for a thin return.

Guess 3: STENT — the last row

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

The E settled into position 3, between the T and the N, and the fifth seat took the answer's second T — the letter that had been yellow in row one, green in row two, and never once tested in a second copy until the answer itself arrived. Three rows of six, three to spare.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did most of the counting. 2,316 to 20 in a single row is a collapse of the kind openers are chosen for, and it happened without placing a single letter after position 1 — the yellows and greys did all of it.

Second, the decisive row produced four greens and still was not the answer. A row that green reads as a solution to anyone glancing at the board, and it is not. The only tile in it that carried new information was the yellow E — a repeat of a verdict from row one — plus the grey O that vacated position 3.

Third, the answer hid a duplicate. STENT carries two T's, and no row before the last ever offered the letter twice. The green T at position 2 looked like the whole T story; the second copy sat at position 5, untested, until the final row filled it in.

Why the Yellow E on Row Two Was the Real Verdict

Row two is the tile that decides this puzzle, and it decides it with its least impressive mark.

The rule that produced it is the two-pass scoring the puzzle runs on every guess:

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.

STONE's E sits at position 5. The answer holds exactly one E, and it lives at position 3. So the first pass finds nothing for E to match at position 5, and the second pass finds inventory remaining — yellow. Same letter, same seat, same verdict as row one.

Two rows saying the same thing is not redundancy, though. It is corroboration, and on this board corroboration was what closed the case. After row one, "E is not at position 5" was one data point among twenty survivors. After row two, with S, T and N locked and O clearing position 3, the same yellow left exactly one consistent arrangement: E into position 3, and the one remaining seat to whatever letter the answer had been keeping in reserve.

The lesson generalizes. When a yellow repeats across rows, most players read it as noise — the letter is known, so the tile feels spent. It is not spent. A repeated yellow is a repeated elimination of a seat, and seats are the scarcest resource on a late board. STONE returned four greens, and the tile that actually picked the word was the one that came back yellow for the second time.

What You Can Take Away

A near-miss row can be near-perfect. STONE matched four seats and still lost, and its own feedback disqualified it — the yellow E at position 5 applies to the guess as much as to the field. When a row comes back almost all green, check the yellow before you celebrate the greens.

Probe words earn their row. The solver passed over its top-ranked candidate to play a near-equal probe, and the probe cut twenty words to one. When your shortlist has a cluster of similar words, a row that tests the shared unknown seats beats a row that gambles on one of them.

Answers hide second copies. STENT's two T's never appeared together in any guess. If a letter came back green once, it costs nothing to remember that the word may hold another — especially when a seat is still open and no other letter is claiming it.

A repeated yellow is fresh information. E yellow at position 5 on two consecutive rows closed the case. If a yellow comes back in a seat you have already ruled out, that seat stays ruled out — and every other seat gets one candidate closer to inevitable.

If you want to play the November 21 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.