Past Wordle Answers: How to Check Every Previous Word

There are two good reasons to look up yesterday's Wordle answers. The first is practical: players with an NYT subscription can replay old puzzles in the official Wordle Archive, and it helps to know what you are walking into. The second is strategic: because Wordle has never repeated an answer, the archive doubles as an elimination list. A word that has already had its day is a word you can stop considering — and late in a tight game, that knowledge is worth a guess.

The Very First Wordle Answers

Wordle launched on June 19, 2021, and its earliest answers show how ordinary the word list was before the game became a phenomenon. Puzzle #0 was CIGAR, followed by REBUT, SISSY, HUMPH, AWAKE, BLUSH, FOCAL, EVADE, NAVAL and SERVE in the days after. Within weeks the player count went from dozens to hundreds of thousands, but the answer list simply kept marching on, one common five-letter word at a time.

A Recent Month: August 2025 Answers

To show the shape of a modern month — the everyday words, the double letters, the occasional eyebrow-raiser like KEFIR — here is a complete recent set of past answers:

The month that followed began with LEAST on September 1, 2025, puzzle #1535 — meaning the archive had passed fifteen hundred answers without a single repeat.

Do Wordle Answers Ever Repeat?

Not so far. Across the entire run from CIGAR in 2021 through to the present list of 1,500-plus puzzles, every daily answer has been used exactly once. The New York Times has never promised the list is infinite, and with several thousand acceptable five-letter words in the game's dictionary there is no practical pressure to recycle yet. Until a repeat actually happens, treat the archive as a hard rule: past answers are dead candidates.

How to Use the Archive Like a Player

• Check before the coin flip. Down to two candidates on guess six? If one of them was the answer three months ago, the choice makes itself.
• Defend your opener. Popular starting words fall over time — LEAST, for example, spent years as a beloved opener before finally being used as an answer in September 2025. Once a word has been the answer, some players retire it and promote a fresh opener.
• Replay with the official archive. NYT Games subscribers can play past puzzles through the Wordle Archive, which is the only official way to solve an old word rather than just read it.
• Spot the patterns. Browsing old answers is a quick education in what the list favours: common everyday words, a steady supply of double letters, and very few plurals ending in S.

Keep this page bookmarked the next time a puzzle comes down to two lookalike answers. One of them has probably already had its day in the sun — and in Wordle, that is as close to a free hint as the game allows.