Wordle Answer 5 November 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 5, 2026 is PARCH. It took four guesses, and the T never moved: position 4 turned green on the very first row and stayed there through the close.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 5 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile actually ruled out, and how the field fell from 2,315 possible words to one. The board was played on our own free daily Wordle, so the tiles below are the tiles the game returned.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

The answer was PARCH, solved in 4 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
BIRTH  ⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
PUTTY  ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
PARCH  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

PARCH is one of the 2,315 words in the official Wordle answer list, so the field we started from is the full 2,315 — no extra word bolted on for this one.

The shape of the board is tidy: two rows each holding a single green T in slot 4, then a row with four greens, then the all-green close. The doubled letter in the answer — the two T's sitting side by side — is what the third row was built to settle.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

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

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 candidates down to 37

SLATE came back ⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛.

• T green at position 4. The fourth slot is settled for the rest of the game.
• S, L, A and E grey. The answer holds no unclaimed copies of any of them — which, for four of the most common letters in English, is a large amount of information in one row.

That is the opener doing exactly what it was picked to do. All 2,315 remaining candidates were scored by letter-position frequency, and SLATE carried the highest information value of the field. The result: 37 words left standing. All but about two words in every hundred were eliminated before the second row.

The day's anchor was already in hand, one guess in.

Guess 2: BIRTH — 37 down to 5

BIRTH returned ⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛ — the same pattern as the opener.

• T green at position 4, again. A confirmation, not new information.
• B, I, R and H grey. Four fresh letters spent, four exclusions banked.

Playing a second word with the T back in slot 4 looks conservative. It is not. The row delivers four brand-new letters of coverage while holding a position already known — among the 37 survivors, BIRTH scored highest on positional frequency, and the field answered by collapsing from 37 to 5. That is the sharpest proportional cut of the day, more than sevenfold, from a row whose only green tile was a formality.

Guess 3: PUTTY — 5 down to 1

PUTTY came back ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩, and this is the row worth studying.

• P grey at position 1. The answer has no unclaimed P, so the first letter is not P.
• U green at position 2, Y green at position 5. Two more slots locked.
• T green at position 3 and T green at position 4. The doubled letter, settled in a single row.

Here is why that matters. PUTTY carries two T's, and the answer carries two T's. Each T in the guess matched an answer position and turned green; each one consumed one of the answer's two T copies. One guess, two slots of the same letter, both settled at once — a doubled letter is one row of work, not two.

The word was now _UTTY with the first letter unknown, and only one candidate fit it. The pool went from 5 to 1.

Guess 4: PARCH — confirmation

One candidate standing, so the last row is paperwork. PARCH came back all green and the puzzle closed in four.

Note what the chain never did: it never guessed at the first letter. B, I, R, H and P all missed, and the first slot was never tested by trial — N was simply what the arithmetic left standing.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did the heavy lifting in absolute terms: 2,315 down to 37. A row that removes all but about two words in every hundred before you have learned anything about specific letters is the return a good opener is designed for.

Second, the proportional record belongs to row two, and it did not need a single new green. Holding a known tile while spending four fresh letters cut 37 to 5. Coverage of unseen letters, on a small pool, is worth more than another confirmation.

Third, the flat tail is not waste. Once one candidate remains, 1 to 1 means the word is known and the last row only proves it. The funnel had already done its job; the closing row is a receipt.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Most Wordle arguments start from one wrong reading of grey. A grey tile does not mean the letter is missing. It means the answer has no unclaimed copies of that letter left.

Today's third row demonstrates the rule from both directions at once. PUTTY holds one P and two T's. The answer holds no P and two T's. So the P went grey — zero unclaimed copies — while both T's went green, each claiming one of the answer's two copies. Same row, same marking pass, two different verdicts, both correct. Anyone who reads grey as "the letter is not in the word" would be fine on the P but would have no framework at all for the two green T's.

The bookkeeping runs in two passes, and it is worth doing explicitly:

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.

Read each tile as a statement about counts and the board becomes arithmetic. That is the whole filtering engine; the rest is choosing which word to spend.

On choosing: score every surviving candidate by how often its letters sit in each position across the field, weight the positional part heavily, and add a small bonus for distinct-letter coverage. Position beats presence. It is why SLATE is a strong opener even when four of its five letters die — the four that died were bought in the same row as the one that locked.

The published work on the game points the same way. A University of Aberdeen research group showed that a strong fixed opener plus disciplined follow-up finds the target in three to four moves; a Binghamton University team formalises the same intuition with information entropy; a University of Basel bachelor's thesis puts entropy-driven play at an average of 3.43 guesses. None of it depends on intuition about words. All of it depends on counting tiles.

What You Can Take Away

The opener is a census, not a shot. SLATE returned one green and four dead letters, and that was enough to leave only about two words in every hundred standing. Judge your opener by the size of the field it leaves, not by how green it looks.

Re-anchoring a known green is a legitimate second row. BIRTH put the T back in slot 4 and spent four fresh letters around it. The cut from 37 to 5 came from the fresh letters, and nothing was lost by confirming the known one.

A doubled letter is one guess, not two problems. When a letter appears twice in the answer, a guess containing it twice settles both slots in a single row. PUTTY's two green T's did in one turn what two separate probes would have needed two turns for.

If you want to play the same board or see how it compares with earlier days, the Wordle game page and the daily answer archive both run free, with no sign-up.