Capon? Where Wordle's Rarest Answers Really Come From

WARNING: SPOILER. This article reveals the Wordle answer for Wednesday, August 26, 2026 (puzzle #1,894), plus a few older answers. If you haven't played today yet, come back after.

If you opened Wordle this morning (Wednesday, August 26, 2026 — puzzle #1,894) and finished it muttering "capon?", you have company. A capon is a castrated rooster fattened for the table — a word you meet in a Dickens novel or a French cookbook, and almost nowhere else. It's the kind of answer that makes people ask the same two questions: is Wordle getting harder? and isn't there a list somewhere?

There is a list. It's just not the list the game uses any more. That turns out to be the whole story of CAPON, so let's tell it properly — with numbers.

The list you can find online isn't the list

When Josh Wardle built Wordle in 2021, every possible answer was sitting in the page's source code: 2,315 five-letter words, in the exact order they would appear, one per day, for the next six years. Anyone who looked could see them — the full list is still archived, for example on David Rusin's Wordle pages at UT Austin, whose analysis of the list is worth a read on its own. Rusin's description of it is exactly right: an idiosyncratic choice. Wardle picked words he and his partner recognised, so the list has SQUAD and SQUIB but not SQUID, no regular plurals, almost no regular past tenses, and yet room for WOOER, GAYLY and OUTGO.

Then the New York Times bought the game in early 2022 and started tidying. Six words came out as unfamiliar or offensive — AGORA, FIBRE, LYNCH, PUPAL, SLAVE and WENCH — leaving 2,309. And in November 2022 the Times gave Wordle a dedicated editor, Tracy Bennett, and stopped following Wardle's order altogether. From that point the answers were hand-scheduled, and the editor was free to add words that were never in the original file.

CAPON is one of those words. It does not appear anywhere in the 2,315. It was legal to guess — the guess dictionary is far larger, about 14,850 words — but under the original game it could never have been the answer. Today it was, because someone chose it.

Every answer, scored for how common it is

To see how unusual CAPON really is, we pulled the complete Wordle answer history — all 1,895 puzzles from June 19, 2021 through today — straight from the Times' own daily puzzle feed, and scored every word with a standard corpus-frequency measure called the Zipf scale (from the open-source wordfreq project). Zipf is simple to read: a word at 5 shows up about once in every 10,000 words of ordinary English text; each step down the scale is ten times rarer. THE sits around 7.7. CLICK, yesterday's answer, is 4.8. LEDGE is 3.4. CAPON is 2.19 — roughly once in every six million words. That's not "a word you don't use much"; that's a word most people have read a handful of times in their lives.

On that scale, CAPON is the 45th rarest answer in Wordle's entire history, out of 1,895. Only 75 words on Wardle's original list score lower. It is genuinely one of the obscure ones — your instinct was right.

Here is the bottom of the barrel: the rarest words ever to be a Wordle answer, with whether each was on the original list.

Word	Date it ran	Zipf	On the original list?
WOOER	Sep 5, 2021	1.18	Yes
ELATE	Aug 30, 2025	1.33	Yes
GUNKY	Mar 6, 2026	1.42	No — editor pick
PARER	Sep 16, 2022	1.55	Yes
PRIMP	Nov 13, 2024	1.55	No — editor pick
ABASE	Jul 15, 2021	1.56	Yes
CORER	Oct 15, 2024	1.58	Yes
UNFED	Jul 25, 2021	1.63	Yes
GOFER	Jul 25, 2025	1.69	No — editor pick
WAXEN	Jan 19, 2026	1.69	Yes
SNAKY	Aug 14, 2023	1.72	Yes
DEMUR	Jul 1, 2026	1.78	Yes
PSHAW	Jul 15, 2026	1.79	No — editor pick
EXULT	Dec 4, 2021	1.80	Yes
QUALM	Apr 11, 2023	1.89	Yes

Notice that the very worst offenders — WOOER, PARER, ABASE, UNFED — are Wardle's, from the game's first year. The original list was never as "everyday" as people remember. Its 20 rarest entries include GAYLY, OUTGO, VAUNT, ICILY, UTILE, POESY, ECLAT and OVINE, and 216 of its 2,315 words sit below Zipf 2.5, the level where you should expect a chunk of players to have never seen the word.

The 50 words the editor added

Bennett has said in interviews that she has added a few dozen words to the pool. We can now list them exactly, because any answer that isn't in the original 2,315 must be an addition. There have been 50 so far, and today's is the newest:

Year	Editor-added answers
2023	GUANO, SNAFU, BALSA, KAZOO
2024	LASER, PIOUS, BEAUT, MOMMY, PRIMP, UVULA
2025	ATLAS, SQUID, INDIE, SPATE, SUEDE, GRIFT, TAUPE, ATRIA, NERVY, LORIS, TIZZY, GOFER, KEFIR, KNELL, MATTE, GIZMO, TINGE, COLIC, MUGGY
2026	SITAR, OOMPH, MOOCH, SHRED, HYDRA, GUNKY, OASIS, CAROM, CUBIT, TOADY, DIVOT, EMOJI, MAVEN, PSHAW, SHILL, ALOHA, CLUNK, GEODE, ASPIC, RUNNY, CAPON

Some of these are obvious repairs to Wardle's gaps — LASER, ATLAS, SQUID, INDIE, EMOJI, OASIS and SHRED are all perfectly ordinary words, and it's faintly absurd they were ever missing. But look at the rest. GUNKY, PRIMP, GOFER, PSHAW, CAROM, UVULA, GEODE, CUBIT, ASPIC, TOADY, DIVOT, KEFIR, CAPON: the additions skew hard toward the exotic. The average added word scores 2.64 on the Zipf scale, against 3.60 for the original list — the editor's new words are, on average, almost ten times rarer than Wardle's.

So has Wordle actually gotten harder?

Is Wordle getting harder? Honestly: no

This is the part that surprised us. Compare the average commonness of every answer before the editor took over (June 2021 to November 6, 2022) with every answer since:

Period	Puzzles	Average Zipf	Median Zipf
Wardle's order (Jun 2021 – Nov 2022)	506	3.69	3.59
Editor era (Nov 2022 – today)	1,389	3.69	3.63

Identical. The editor-era median is even a hair higher — slightly more common words, day to day. The 50 rare additions are real, but they are 50 puzzles out of nearly 1,400, and they are balanced by the editor quietly steering away from the ugliest corners of Wardle's list. Across the whole history, only 138 answers have scored below Zipf 2.5, and the rate hasn't climbed.

What has changed is the texture of the hard days. Under Wardle, a hard day was usually an awkward form of a familiar word — PARER, UNFED, ABASE, WOOER. Under the editor, a hard day is more often a real, specific, slightly delicious noun you may simply never have met: KEFIR, ASPIC, GEODE, LORIS, CAPON. Same difficulty on paper; a very different feeling when you lose. A comment-section flood about GUANO is not evidence that the game got harder, it's evidence that people notice a word they've never seen more than a word they half-know.

One more thing the list can't tell you: repeats have started

Wardle's design promised every answer would be new. That promise quietly ended this year. On February 2, 2026 the answer was CIGAR — which was also the very first Wordle answer, on June 19, 2021. Since then the Times has re-run 23 earlier answers, including SQUAD, AWAKE, LINEN, GRADE, IVORY, TRACE and — yesterday — CLICK, which first appeared on Halloween 2021. If you've been playing since the beginning and a solution felt strangely familiar this year, it probably was.

For a game whose original pool was six years deep, that's the clearest sign yet that the answer list is now a living, edited thing rather than a countdown. Which also answers the second question people ask on CAPON days: no, there is no longer a list you can look at to see what's coming. The one you'll find online tells you what could have been the answer in 2021. It has nothing to say about tomorrow.

The uncomfortable part: our own list

We build Pairdle, a daily six-letter word game, and it would be cheap to write all of the above without turning the same lens on ourselves. So we did. Yesterday's Pairdle Challenge word was POLITY, which one of our own team missed and grumbled about for exactly the reason you grumbled about CAPON.

On the same Zipf scale, POLITY scores 2.88 — about five times more common than CAPON, but still the 65th rarest of the 3,038 solution words in Pairdle's pool. Pairdle's average answer (3.83) is somewhat more common than Wordle's (3.69), and only 13 of our solutions fall below 2.5 versus 138 in Wordle's history — but our floor has its own oddities. The rarest Pairdle answers are MILKER, HURLER, ENDIVE, WHISKS and ECLAIR, and if CAPON were six letters long it would be the sixth-rarest word we'd ever asked for. Pairdle gives you the letter pairs, so a rare word is a smaller sin than it is in Wordle — but "the player has heard of it" is still the bar, and POLITY was a near miss. We're looking at our tail end.

What to do on the next CAPON day

Nothing you don't already do — but do it knowing the odds. Roughly one Wordle in fourteen is a word below Zipf 2.5, and the rare ones are increasingly concrete nouns rather than odd verb forms. When you're on guess five with C _ P O N and nothing common fits, the answer is that rare word you're half-remembering from a cookbook. Play it. The editor put it there on purpose.

And if you want the good starting-word habits that make the other thirteen days easy, we've written about which letters Wordle actually favours and put together a reference of the most common five-letter words.

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Method note: answer history is the Times' own daily puzzle data for every date from June 19, 2021 to August 26, 2026 (1,895 puzzles). The original list is Josh Wardle's 2,315-word source list as archived by David Rusin. Word frequencies are Zipf scores from the open-source wordfreq English corpus, rounded to two decimals. Pairdle figures are computed over Pairdle's full pre-generated solution pool.