Someone is choosing these words. Not a machine drawing from a dictionary: a person, with a taste, working from a list and crossing words off it. Every answer the Times has run since 2021 is on record, and the record shows a mind. The editor never repeated a word for four and a half years, then in February 2026 began reaching back, about one morning in ten, and only into the oldest part of the list. She avoids echoing yesterday. She likes a double letter more each year. She filters the grim and keeps the cheerful.
This helper reads those habits and plays against them. It weighs every word that still fits by how much it looks like something this editor would pick, and by whether it has already run. Then it works out, for each guess you could make, how many more turns you would need on average, and tells you the two honest options: the shot that could end the game now, and the probe that cannot win but settles the field for a sure solve next turn. The one red flag it watches for is the corner: four letters known, one missing, and a crowd of look-alikes. Before you are in that corner, it names the word that eliminates the crowd.
The lesson behind it: when you read a human process through its traces, you are never reading one hand. The editor's hand changes its mind without telling you. The modeller's hand prefers the past it was trained on. The clock's hand freezes a true observation into a false one. And the player's hand, on a good morning, refuses the tool, goes around it, and comes back with a napkin. The app is the napkin, written down.
Saved on this device as you finish them. Games on another device won't appear here.
Type a guess, then click each tile to set its colour — grey → yellow → green. Suggestions update as you go.
Suggestions are ranked by how much each guess is expected to narrow things down, tuned against the full history of past puzzles.
The editor tends not to echo the day before, so words resembling (yesterday's answer) are nudged down.
Solves … of past puzzles, … of them in three guesses. It does not predict tomorrow's answer.
Stuck between look-alikes? Two ways out:
…or just guess the most likely word above and hope.
Your second guess aim: win in 3
Most promising letters
Ranked by how evenly each splits the remaining words. 1.00 bit = a perfect coin-flip.
Decision log
What each guess actually bought you, and why it was played.
Best guesses
Tap any word to drop it into the grid.
Post-mortem
The second guess decides a game. Enter the NYT bot's second guess — we'll compare it to yours and see what today taught us. Every board you bring back helps read the editor.