About Us

The New York Times publishes a new Wordle every day. Anyone who has played long enough eventually asks the same two questions: has this word been used before, and does the game ever repeat itself? Both questions had answers scattered across half a dozen sites, most of them slow to load, easy to spoil yourself on, or a year out of date. This site was built to answer them properly, in one place, and to keep answering them every day without going stale.

What this site actually is

Pastwordlewords.com is a daily-updated record of every Wordle answer since the puzzle launched on 19 June 2021. The full archive lives on the homepage. The supporting pages exist because the archive alone stopped being the whole picture in February 2026, when the New York Times quietly began letting answers repeat. A dedicated page tracks every repeat with dates and gaps. A statistics page turns the archive into patterns — which letters show up where, how many vowels a typical answer holds, and which starting letters cover the most ground. A word lookup lets you check any five-letter word in a second without scrolling through the whole list.

The intent behind the site is narrow and old-fashioned: be the most accurate and most current source for a specific question, and get out of the way. There are no popups asking for your email. There are no autoplay videos. There are no rankings, listicles, or opinion pieces about Wordle strategy that could have been generated by anyone. What is here is the data, presented in the way that seemed to help the most people the fastest.

The one rule that governs everything

The list on the homepage always ends at yesterday. Today’s answer is stored in the database — it has to be, so tomorrow’s list is correct — but it is never shown on the archive page. If you arrived here mid-puzzle, nothing on the main list can spoil it for you.

This is not a limitation. It is the reason the site exists in the format it does. A player checking whether their guess has been used before should not have to scroll past the answer they are actively trying to solve. Every design decision on the archive follows from that rule, including the word lookup, which will tell you whether any five-letter word has ever been an answer up through yesterday, and will say so in language that never accidentally reveals today.

The separate today page and hints page exist for the different audience: the one that has already finished playing, or given up. That audience wants the opposite thing, and the site respects both.

How the data is kept accurate

The record here is verified against two independent sources at the start of each day and reconciled if they ever disagree. The initial archive was cross-checked entry by entry before the site launched, and the count of repeated answers was matched against a third source before publication. The four days on which the New York Times changed the puzzle mid-day — resulting in two different answers for a single puzzle number — are all preserved with both answers, keyed as 241a/241b, 284a/284b, 324a/324b and 325a/325b. Deleting those or picking a single winner would make the archive quietly wrong for anyone whose Wordle history included the other version.

New answers are added by an automated sync that runs shortly after midnight US Eastern time, when the day rolls over for the puzzle. If that sync ever fails for more than a full day, an alert is triggered internally and the gap is filled by hand rather than left in place. Every entry on the site can be traced to a specific puzzle number and a specific date, and if you ever find one you believe is wrong, the contact page is the place to say so. Corrections are made the same day they are received, once verified.

What this site is not

It is not run by a professional Wordle player. There is no daily streak here, no rankings, no leaderboards, no take on which starting word is best. The statistics page shows what the data actually says; it does not tell you what to do with it. What it will not do is invent expertise it does not have. If you are looking for a personality who plays every day and writes about it, several of them exist and do that well. This is a different kind of resource: a reference, maintained carefully, aimed at a specific question.

It is also not affiliated with the New York Times, the original creator of Wordle, or anyone else who publishes about the game. Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company. This site references and archives publicly available puzzle answers so people can look them up. Nothing here is endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with the New York Times.

Feedback and corrections

The single most useful thing a reader can send is a correction. If a word or a date on the site does not match what you remember playing, the contact page has an email address that is checked every day. Include the puzzle number if you can, and the date you played it. Genuine mistakes are fixed the same day.

Everything else — a feature that would help, a piece of data that is missing, a page that loads badly on your device — is welcome through the same address. The site is small enough that every message gets read.

The archive will keep growing for as long as people keep playing Wordle. The job here is to make sure that when it does, this is still the fastest and most accurate place to check what has come before.