Wordle Answer 8 November 2026 (Solved in 5 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 8, 2026 is FIRST. It took five guesses, and the most instructive tile on the board is not any of the greens — it is the grey T in row two, sitting three seats away from a green T inside the very same guess.

That pair of tiles is the whole lesson of today's puzzle. Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 8 nov 2026: all five rows, 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 what follows are the tiles the game returned, not a reconstruction.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

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

SLATE  🟨⬛⬛🟨⬛
STOUT  🟨⬛⬛⬛🟩
SHIRT  🟨⬛🟨🟨🟩
WRIST  ⬛🟨🟨🟩🟩
FIRST  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,968, a Sunday board. First is the ordinal of one — the front of a queue, the earliest moment, the top of a ranking. It is one of the most common words in English and, less helpfully for solvers, one of the most heavily recycled letter sets in the language.

FIRST sits inside the official 2,315-word answer list, so today's field opened at exactly 2,315 candidates. No adjustment, no asterisk.

The shape of the board tells its story in one glance: the greens march in from the right. Position 5 goes green on row two, holds on row three, positions 4 and 5 on row four, then the entire word on row five. This is a board that was filled in backwards.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Five rows, each one the highest-scoring candidate available at the moment it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 74

SLATE came back 🟨⬛⬛🟨⬛.

• S yellow at position 1. The word contains an S, but not as its opening letter.
• T yellow at position 4. The word contains a T, but not third from last.
• L, A and E grey. The answer holds zero remaining copies of each.

Two yellows, three greys. A productive opener by quantity — five letters classified in one row — and a weak one by position, because not a single tile landed in its true home.

All 2,315 candidates were scored by letter-position frequency, SLATE carried the highest information value on the field, and the pool fell from 2,315 to 74. Roughly three words in every hundred survived.

This is the first thing today's board teaches. A yellow tile is a statement about inventory, not about position: it tells you the letter is in the word and simultaneously tells you this seat is wrong. Two yellows bought a precise filter — 74 words left — and still left five positions completely unknown.

Guess 2: STOUT — 74 down to 9

STOUT returned 🟨⬛⬛⬛🟩.

• T green at position 5. The word ends in T.
• S still yellow at position 1. An S is in there; the front seat is still wrong.
• T grey at position 2. This is the tile worth stopping on.
• O and U grey. Two more vowels retired.

Read the two T tiles together. Position 5 says there is a T here. Position 2 says there are no copies of T left for this seat. Both are true at once, because the word holds exactly one T and the green tile at the end had already claimed it. The grey tile is not claiming the word lacks a T — it is reporting that the T inventory is exhausted.

The pool dropped from 74 to 9. The word now ends in T, and that constraint alone swept away almost everything left standing.

Guess 3: SHIRT — 9 down to 3

SHIRT came back 🟨⬛🟨🟨🟩.

• T green at position 5. Third row running.
• S yellow at position 1. Second row running.
• I yellow at position 3. First appearance of I in the game, and it is in the word.
• R yellow at position 4. First appearance of R, also in the word.
• H grey. Retired.

Now look at what SHIRT actually is. It carries four of the answer's letters — S, I, R, T — with only the H standing in for the F. Rearranged, those five letters become FIRST. So the row held almost the entire answer, in the wrong order, with one letter swapped, and it was still not the word.

The pool went from 9 to 3. Learning that I and R exist, and that H does not, cut two-thirds of the remaining field.

Guess 4: WRIST — 3 down to 1

WRIST returned ⬛🟨🟨🟩🟩.

• S green at position 4. After three rows of yellow, the S finally sits where it belongs.
• T green at position 5. Unchanged.
• R yellow at position 2. In the word, wrong seat again — this time from the other side.
• I yellow at position 3. Still in the word, still not in that seat.
• W grey. Retired.

The same near-miss shape as the row before: W, R, I, S, T — again four of the answer's letters in the wrong order, with the W replacing the F. Two consecutive guesses, each one substitution away from the solution, each still wrong.

But the row did real work. The tail is now -ST with two greens locked, S has finally been placed, and the pool has collapsed from 3 to 1. One candidate remained from the original 2,315.

Guess 5: FIRST — confirmation

One candidate standing, so the final row is a receipt rather than a deduction. FIRST came back all green — five tiles in their true homes — and the puzzle closed in five.

One detail is worth pulling out: F was never played before this row. No earlier guess contained it, so no tile ever said anything about F at all. The answer's opening letter was not found by testing it; it was found by eliminating H and W from that seat and letting the arithmetic point at what remained.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did most of its work through inventory rather than position. 2,315 down to 74 is an enormous cut, but it came from knowing which letters were in the word, not where they sat — which is precisely why four more rows were still needed.

Second, the middle rows were narrow but never wasted. STOUT pinned the final T, SHIRT established I and R and killed H, WRIST moved the S home. Each row changed the shape of the search instead of re-testing what was already known: 74 to 9, 9 to 3, 3 to 1.

Third, the flat tail is normal. Once WRIST left a single survivor, the fifth row could not have taught anything new. The funnel had already done the work; the closing row only proves it.

The Rule That Makes Wordle Filtering Work

Today's board is a clean demonstration of the machinery underneath, and those two T tiles are the perfect illustration.

A grey tile means the answer has zero unclaimed copies of that letter. Not "the letter is nowhere in the word" in some loose sense, but a precise claim about counts, made after the greens have taken their share.

The bookkeeping runs in two passes:

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

Apply that to STOUT. The green T at position 5 consumes the word's only T. When the scan reaches position 2, the T inventory is empty, so that tile turns grey — even though the letter is plainly present four tiles to the right. One green and one grey about the same letter in the same row is not a contradiction; it is the counting rule working exactly as designed.

The same logic governs filtering. A green locks a position. A yellow demands that a candidate contain at least the number of that letter already declared. A grey caps it at the number already declared — and for today's other greys, L, A, E, O, U, H and W, that cap is zero, because no green or yellow had ever claimed a share of any of them.

That is the whole filtering engine. The rest — which word to spend next — 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.

What You Can Take Away

Read greys as counts, not verdicts. The grey T in row two is the most useful tile on today's board, and it only makes sense if you treat the answer as a stock of letters with quantities. Once the single T is accounted for, every other T in every future guess is worthless — and you know that a row earlier than a player who reads grey as "no T here".

A yellow is a debt you pay by moving. The S spent three rows yellow before going green at position 4. The R was yellow at position 4, then at position 2, then landed at position 3. Yellow letters do not resolve themselves; the only way to convert one is to offer it a new seat. When a letter has already been eliminated from two seats, the third is usually where it lives.

Four correct letters is not a solved word. SHIRT and WRIST each contained four of the answer's five letters, and the puzzle still needed two more rows after the first of them. Once the tail is green the remaining question is narrow, but it is not trivial — and the cheapest way through it is to keep proposing whole words rather than guessing letters in isolation.

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