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 it yet, come back after.

If you opened Wordle on Wednesday, August 26, 2026 (puzzle #1,894) and finished it muttering "capon?", you had company. A capon is a castrated rooster fattened for the table. You meet the word in a Dickens novel or a French cookbook, and almost nowhere else. Answers like this make people ask two things: is Wordle getting harder? and isn't there a list somewhere?

There is a list. It is not the list the game uses any more, and that is the story of CAPON. Here it is, 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, and his analysis of the list is good reading too. Rusin calls it an idiosyncratic choice, and he is right. 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, since the guess dictionary is far larger at about 14,850 words, but under the original game it could never have been the answer. On August 26 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 August 26, 2026, 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, the answer the day before, is 4.8. LEDGE is 3.4. CAPON is 2.19, roughly once in every six million words. Most people have read it 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. If it felt obscure, that is because it is.

Here are the rarest words ever to be a Wordle answer, and whether each was on the original list.

The very rarest (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 CAPON is the newest:

Some of these fill obvious gaps in Wardle's list. LASER, ATLAS, SQUID, INDIE, EMOJI, OASIS and SHRED are ordinary words, and it is odd they were ever missing. Now look at the rest. GUNKY, PRIMP, GOFER, PSHAW, CAROM, UVULA, GEODE, CUBIT, ASPIC, TOADY, DIVOT, KEFIR, CAPON: most of the additions are unusual words. The average added word scores 2.64 on the Zipf scale, against 3.60 for the original list. On average, the editor's new words are almost ten times rarer than Wardle's.

Is Wordle getting harder? Honestly: no

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

The averages are identical. The editor-era median is even a hair higher, so the words are slightly more common day to day. The 50 rare additions are real, but they are 50 puzzles out of nearly 1,400, and the editor has also steered away from the oddest 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 specific noun you may never have met: KEFIR, ASPIC, GEODE, LORIS, CAPON. The difficulty is the same on paper, but losing to one feels different. A flood of comments about GUANO does not show the game got harder. It shows people notice a word they have 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 ended in 2026. On February 2, 2026 the answer was CIGAR, which was also the very first Wordle answer, on June 19, 2021. By August 26 the Times had re-run 23 earlier answers, including SQUAD, AWAKE, LINEN, GRADE, IVORY, TRACE and, on August 25, CLICK, which first appeared on Halloween 2021. If you have played since the beginning and an answer felt familiar this year, it probably was.

The original pool was six years deep, so repeats mean the answer list is now edited by hand rather than counted down. That also answers the second question people ask on CAPON days: no, there is no longer a list you can look at to see what is coming. The one you will find online tells you what could have been the answer in 2021, not what comes tomorrow.

The uncomfortable part: our own list

We build Pairdle, a daily six-letter word game, and it would be unfair to write all of the above without checking our own list the same way. So we checked it. When this post first ran in August 2026, one of our own team missed the Pairdle word POLITY and grumbled about it for the same reason you grumbled about CAPON.

POLITY scores 2.88 on the same Zipf scale, about five times more common than CAPON. It is no longer on our list. Pairdle 1.5, out in September 2026, picks each day's answer in a new way, and POLITY is not among the 935 different answers it has scheduled for its 1,124 daily boards. Across those 935, the average Pairdle 1.5 answer scores 3.84, a little more common than Wordle's 3.69, and only 5 fall below 2.5, against 138 in Wordle's history. The rarest are MILKER, HURLER, ENDIVE, SCOFFS and MITTEN. If CAPON were six letters long, it would be the fourth rarest word on the list. The rarest answer players had met from the 1.5 release up to September 24, 2026 was ARCANE on September 12, 2026 (Zipf 2.99, 40th rarest of the 935). Pairdle gives you the letter pairs, so a rare word hurts less than it does in Wordle, and our guide to getting better at Pairdle shows how to use those pairs. Still, "the player has heard of it" is the bar, and we keep checking the bottom of the list. If you want to see how that plays out in wins and losses rather than word rarity, we measured it against Wordle directly.

What to do on the next CAPON day

Nothing you don't already do, but now you know 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.

For the 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 for Pairdle 1.5: the distinct answers of the six-letter Pairdle level across all 1,124 scheduled daily boards, recomputed on September 24, 2026.