Wordle Answer 23 November 2026 (Solved in 3 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 23, 2026 is FILTH. Three rows — and the first one alone cut 2,315 possible words down to 4, which is as close to a knock-out opener as this archive records. The board spent its second row confirming what the opener had already proven, and its third collecting the word.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 23 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 FILTH, solved in 3 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛🟨⬛🟩⬛
CLOTH  ⬛🟨⬛🟩🟩
FILTH  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,983, a Monday board. Filth is dirt, grime, the gross kind — which makes it pleasantly ironic that the solve itself was clinically clean: no wasted rows, no near-misses, three guesses with two to spare.

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

The board's signature is repetition of the productive kind. Rows one and two both carry the same two decisive tiles — L yellow at position 2, T green at position 4. The opener proved that pair; the second row reproduced it, added one more green, and finished the deduction. And the two letters that actually identify the word — F and I, its first half — make their first appearance anywhere on the board in the answer row itself.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

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

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 4

SLATE came back ⬛🟨⬛🟩⬛.

• T green at position 4. Placed on the first row, and never questioned again.
• L yellow at position 2. The word holds an L, not in the second seat.
• S, A and E grey. None of them is in the answer.

One green, one yellow, three kills — and 2,315 words became 4. Compare that to what the same opener produced on yesterday's board, where it left hundreds of candidates standing. The difference is entirely in the greys: S, A and E are three of the most common letters in the answer list, and all three went dead in a single row. When an opener kills three frequent letters and places a fourth, the surviving field is not a haystack; it is a handful. Four candidates, one row in, with the whole board still to play — the solve was already mostly done, even if the answer itself was not yet on the board.

Guess 2: CLOTH — 4 down to 1

CLOTH returned ⬛🟨⬛🟩🟩.

• C grey at position 1. Dead.
• L yellow at position 2. Second row, same seat, same verdict: the word holds an L, and position 2 is not its home.
• O grey at position 3. Dead.
• T green at position 4. Holding, exactly where the opener placed it.
• H green at position 5. New placement — the word ends in H.

Four down to 1, and the row's work splits neatly in two. The greens finished the frame: T at position 4 was already locked, and the H at position 5 locked a second seat, so the word's shape is now fixed at both ends — something-omething-T-H, with the first three seats built from letters that avoid S, A, E, C and O. The greys and the repeat yellow did the rest: L is in the word but has been rejected from position 2 twice, and with positions 4 and 5 taken, its only remaining homes are 1 and 3. Of the four survivors from row one, exactly one fits every one of those facts. The other three fell in a single row.

Guess 3: FILTH — the last row

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

The F and the I — the two letters no earlier row contained — took positions 1 and 2, the L settled into position 3 after two yellow rejections from position 2, and the T and H closed it out where rows one and two had already pinned them. Three rows of six, three to spare.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did the counting for the entire board. 2,315 to 4 is a collapse of more than five hundred to one, and nothing after row one came close to matching it — the second row only had to sort four words.

Second, the productive pair repeated. L yellow at position 2 and T green at position 4 appear on both of the first two rows, and the second appearance is not wasted duplication: re-confirming a green costs nothing and keeps the frame honest, while the repeated yellow tightened the noose on L's seat a second time.

Third, the answer's front half was brand new. F and I never appeared in any row before the last one. The board was solved around the word's back half and its two dead letters, and the front half simply walked in with the answer.

Why One Opener Cut 2,315 to 4 and Another Left Hundreds

SLATE is the fixed opener on every board in this chain, and it is worth stopping on what that means: the same five letters, scored against the same field, produced hundreds of survivors yesterday and 4 today. The opener did not change. The answer did.

That is the whole story of openers in one comparison. SLATE carries five high-frequency letters, so its yield depends almost entirely on how many of them the answer happens to hold. Against UPEND, it matched one letter, which left hundreds of words alive. Against FILTH, it killed S, A and E outright, placed the T, and flagged the L — four results on five tiles — and the field collapsed to 4.

The general shape is this: an opener's job is to produce constraints, and constraints compound. Each grey removes the letter from every remaining word. A green removes one letter from consideration for a whole seat at once, across the entire field. A yellow removes a letter from a seat while keeping it in the word — a two-sided constraint. FILTH's board got one of each plus two more greys on the very first row, and four of the five tiles were pulling in the same direction at once. When that happens, no amount of cleverness downstream matters; the board is already over.

The practical read for your own games: do not judge your opener by whether it turns green. Judge it by how many new constraints it created. Yesterday's opener felt bad and left a large share of the field alive; today's felt identical in shape — one green, one yellow, three greys, same pattern class — and left four words. The tile colors are the same; the letters they killed are not.

What You Can Take Away

Grey tiles on common letters are the fastest collapse there is. Three frequent letters died in row one, and 2,315 became 4. A row of greys on S, A, E-class letters outperforms a row of yellows on rare ones.

A repeated yellow still has work to do. L came back yellow at position 2 on two consecutive rows. The first verdict narrowed the field; the second, combined with the new green at position 5, left the L with only two possible homes. Repetition is elimination compounding, not the board stalling.

Reproduce a proven pair when you have one. CLOTH re-tested the L/T combination and added the H — it kept every confirmed tile intact, extended the frame by one seat, and finished the puzzle in the same stroke. When a row has already paid off, build on it rather than starting over.

Ends before middles. Both greens in row two anchored the word's back end — T and H at positions 4 and 5. With the tail fixed and the head constrained, the middle had nowhere to hide.

If you want to play the November 23 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.