Wordle Answer 29 July 2026 (Solved in 5 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for July 29, 2026 is VALVE. It took 5 guesses, and every row below is reproducible: the same scoring function and the same ranking heuristic produced this exact chain from the official answer list.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 29 jul 2026: every guess, what each tile ruled out, and how 2,315 possible words fell to one. The board was played on our own free daily Wordle, so the tiles match the game exactly.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

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

SLATE  ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩
BLARE  ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩
ALIVE  🟨🟨⬛🟩🟩
HALVE  ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
VALVE  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

The field we started from is the official Wordle answer list — 2,315 candidates at the first row.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

5 rows. Each one was the highest-scoring candidate on the field at the moment it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 34

SLATE came back ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5.
• A, L yellow. In the word, but not in the seats this row gave them.
• S, T grey. The answer holds no unclaimed copies of any of them.

The candidate pool fell from 2,315 to 34.

Guess 2: BLARE — 34 down to 24

BLARE came back ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩.

• E green at position 5.
• A, L yellow. In the word, but not in the seats this row gave them.
• B, R grey. The answer holds no unclaimed copies of any of them.

The candidate pool fell from 34 to 24.

Guess 3: ALIVE — 24 down to 3

ALIVE came back 🟨🟨⬛🟩🟩.

• V green at position 4. E green at position 5.
• A, L yellow. In the word, but not in the seats this row gave them.
• I grey. The answer holds no unclaimed copy of it.

The candidate pool fell from 24 to 3.

Guess 4: HALVE — 3 down to 1

HALVE came back ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩.

• A green at position 2. L green at position 3. V green at position 4. E green at position 5.
• H grey. The answer holds no unclaimed copy of it.

The candidate pool fell from 3 to 1.

Guess 5: VALVE — 1 down to 1

VALVE came back 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩.

• V green at position 1. A green at position 2. L green at position 3. V green at position 4. E green at position 5.

With a single candidate left, this row was confirmation: 1 to 1.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

The opener did the heavy lifting in absolute terms, and the sharpest proportional cut came wherever fresh letters met a small field. The flat tail at the end is not waste: once one candidate remains, the closing row is a receipt, not a search.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

A grey tile does not mean the letter is missing from the answer. It means the answer has no unclaimed copies of that letter left. A yellow tile means the letter is present but in the wrong seat. Read each tile as a statement about counts and positions, and the board becomes arithmetic:

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

That is the whole filtering engine. The rest is scoring the survivors by how often their letters sit in each position across the field, weighting position heavily, and spending the word that asks the most still-unasked questions. The opener alone left only about 1 words in every hundred standing.

What You Can Take Away

Judge a guess by the field it leaves, not by how green it looks. A quiet row of greys that cuts thousands of candidates is worth more than a lucky green on a small field.

Presence is not position. A yellow letter says two things at once — in the word, and not here. Enumerate the seats it has not tried instead of re-testing the ones it has.

Elimination is the strategy, not the fallback. Letters that never appear in a guess are settled by arithmetic alone; the winning word often contains tiles the chain never had to touch.

If you want to play the same board or browse other days, the free daily Wordle and the daily answer archive both run free, with no sign-up.