Today’s Wordle answer is a bit easier than yesterday’s, but definitely has the potential to cause some problems. The NYT’s WordleBot tool says people are solving it in an average of 3.7 guesses, but it’s not the most obvious solution ever and I am seeing some lost streaks on Twitter.
With that in mind, you might find some hints to be helpful. After all, Wordle is a deceptively simple game and failure is only ever six guesses away.
I’ve played every Wordle so far and lost only once, so I’ve got plenty of Wordle tips and tricks to share. I’ve also analyzed every Wordle answer to look for patterns and got some further advice for you there. And if you’re new to the game you should also take a look at my What is Wordle? guide.
Each day, I’ll be updating this article with tips to help you find today’s Wordle answer. And if the hints aren’t enough, I’ll even give you the solution, in case you’re really stuck or just haven’t had time to complete today’s puzzle. I’ve also included my analysis of yesterday’s puzzle, #344, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.
So be warned: spoilers lie ahead for game #345. Only read on if you want to know today’s Wordle answer!
PS: If you’re a music fan then also check out our guide to today’s Heardle answer.
Today’s Wordle answer #345 — hints to help you solve it
My first tip is that you should use one of the best Wordle start words for every game you play. But if you want some more specific clues to today’s Wordle answer then here you go:
- It has two vowels*
- There is one repeated letter
- It ends with a fairly common ending letter
* By vowel I’m meaning A, E, I, O, U. There are other letters that are sometimes considered to be vowels, depending on how they are used.
Those hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today’s Wordle answer. If not, then you can read on for a bigger clue; or, if you just want to know the answer, then skip down further for that.
Alright then, here’s my final hint: Today’s Wordle answer is an island.
OK, it’s time to scroll down for the answer…
Today’s Wordle answer #345, Monday, May 30
So, what is today’s Wordle answer for game #345?
Drumroll please — it’s ATOLL.
We’re back into slightly easier territory to start the week (and celebrate Memorial Day, if you’re in the U.S.), with an answer that the NYT’s WordleBot tool says people are finding in an average of 3.7 guesses.
I’m slightly surprised about that, because it definitely has the potential to cause problems depending on your choice of the best Wordle start words.
For starters, it’s a fairly obscure word. It only ranks 25,342nd in Word and Phrase Info (opens in new tab)‘s list of the most frequently used English words, which is down even on yesterday’s answer (see below), let alone the likes of MONEY or ASSET.
Don’t know what it means? Well, it’s a type of coral island with a lagoon in the middle. You’ll find plenty of them in the Pacific and Indian oceans, for instance the Maldives is chiefly made up of atolls, while Bikini Atoll was the site of a famous WWII battle and then a series of nuclear tests.
So, word wise it might have caused some people a few issues, and the letter formation wasn’t much help either.
As I show in my analysis of every Wordle answer, A is a reasonably common starting letter (sixth overall), but AT is not a common starting combination at all. In fact, only three answers have this format out of 2,309 solutions! The double L at the end is more common — 25 games end in this way — but it’s still only 30th among Wordle ending combinations.
So as with yesterday’s game, this was a double whammy of tricky word and tricky letters.
That said, if you used the same start word as me today, you may well have scored a 2/6 or 3/6. As always, I started with STARE, and today that gave me a green T and a yellow A. On the face of it, that was a fairly standard result — but no. Once I started looking for possible answers, it became clear that there really weren’t many of them.
That T being locked into the second place was the key, as no letters go before a T other than S or a vowel. What’s more, I’d already ruled out both S and E.
However, if your start word was a different one then you will undoubtedly have had a harder time of it today. WordleBot’s choice of CRANE, for instance, left 133 possible solutions for the second guess.
Anyway, my task was a lot easier than that, so I worked through the options, trying AT, OT, IT and UT and could only come up with one word: ATOLL.
Now, here I got lucky — because WordleBot told me afterwards that I actually had two solutions to choose from, ATOLL and ATTIC. But I completely missed the second one.
I daresay if ATOLL had proved to be wrong I would have got ATTIC next guess, but as it happens I didn’t need to and instead scored a nice bonus 2/6!
Let me know how you did in the comments or via email (opens in new tab) — and if you have already got in touch then apologies for the delay in replying, you will get a response soon (honest)!
Yesterday’s Wordle answer #344, Sunday, May 29
Reading this in another time zone where it’s still Sunday? The Wordle answer for game #344 was BAYOU.
Ah! So finally we have a more difficult Wordle answer, after several days of reasonably straightforward ones. Though only slightly more difficult; the NYT’s WordleBot tool says people are solving this one in an average of 4.2 guesses, so it’s exactly half an answer more difficult than Saturday’s of CREPT.
It is potentially an obscure word, though. And I say potentially, because that may depend on geography: Dictionary.com (opens in new tab) describes it as “Chiefly Lower Mississippi Valley and Gulf States” and it’s definitely a word that’s more common in north America than in some other areas. Here in the U.K. we don’t have any bodies of water described as a bayou, to the best of my knowledge. So, for the avoidance of doubt, it means “A marshy arm, inlet, or outlet of a lake, river, etc., usually sluggish or stagnant.”
It ranks 19,210th in Word and Phrase Info (opens in new tab)‘s list of the most frequently used English words, which certainly makes it more obscure than some other recent Wordle answers; ASSET, for instance, was 2,106th and MONEY was 232nd!
It also has a very unusual letter formation, with the Y, O and U all doing things they don’t often do.
As I show in my analysis of every Wordle answer, Y is the second most common ending letter, but it’s pretty infrequent elsewhere. In third position, as it is here, it’s only present in 29 answers; that’s just 1.26% of the 2,309 total.
OU, meanwhile, is a common combination overall — 73 Wordle answers feature it somewhere — but it’s really not likely at the end of a word. In fact, BAYOU is the only instance in which a Wordle ends OU.
In short, it might well have caused you some problems!
My game didn’t get off to a particularly good start. As always, I played my choice of the best Wordle start words, STARE, and here that only gave me a single yellow A.
WordleBot tells me I had 126 solutions remaining, but I could see right away that there was no point in me trying to work out what all the options were. Instead, I concentrated on trying to find likely patterns.
I knew that A is the most common letter to be found in second place, and is only slightly less likely there than it is in third position. And I knew that B is the third most likely starting letter overall. I also knew that LY is the third most likely ending combination.
You can see where I’m going with this, right? Yes, I played BADLY next, based purely on probability. And it proved to be a decent choice.
In fact it proved to be an excellent choice, narrowing down the options from 126 to just 1. Inexplicably, WordleBot’s response was to award me only 82 for skill, despite the fact that it awarded itself 99 for its choice, CANAL, even though that left 13 possible solutions. I’m now fairly sure that WordleBot is actually just a 15-year-old troll sitting behind a laptop somewhere.
Anyway, BADLY confirmed the B and A at the start, and also gave me a yellow Y. And that last fact was the key to my 3/6 today. I went through the options of playing the Y in the fourth position, but couldn’t find a single word that fit. I did the same with the Y in third — BAY– — and came up with just one, BAYOU.
I was a little hesitant about playing it, because it’s not a particularly common word, but it was the only thing that fitted, so I went with it and scored a three.
Previous Wordle answers
If you’re looking for a list of older Wordle answers, we can also help. Here’s a list going back 20 games.
- Wordle #344: BAYOU
- Wordle #343: CREPT
- Wordle #342: TIARA
- Wordle #341: ASSET
- Wordle #340: VOUCH
- Wordle #339: ALBUM
- Wordle #338: HINGE
- Wordle #337: MONEY
- Wordle #336: SCRAP
- Wordle #335: GAMER
- Wordle #334: GLASS
- Wordle #333: SCOUR
- Wordle #332: BEING
- Wordle #331: DELVE
- Wordle #330: YIELD
- Wordle #329: METAL
- Wordle #328: TIPSY
- Wordle #327: SLUNG
- Wordle #326: FARCE
- Wordle #325: GECKO
- Wordle #324: SHINE
Wordle tips — how to win at Wordle
The best tip I can give is to use one of the best Wordle start words. I can’t stress this enough — it makes a massive difference.
Without one, you’ll be scrabbling around in the dark trying (and possibly failing) to find the right five letters (or possibly fewer) out of the 26 possibles. But clever people (not me) have done the math and identified the best start words based on both frequency in English and frequency among Wordle answers. So use them!
Secondly, think about combinations, especially at the start and end. Some options are far more common than others — for instance, SH, ST, CR and CH all feature frequently.
Vowels obviously need consideration too: not all Wordle answers will contain more than one, but plenty do, and some even have three. A good Wordle start word should have used a couple, but if they don’t feature you might well want to try another one or two on your next go.
Plus, remember the Y — this sometimes acts as a surrogate vowel, and is easy to forget. It also appears at the end of plenty of words.
Finally, try out possibilities. So long as you don’t press ‘Enter’ you can try possible answers to see how they look on screen. Put in likely letters plus any you know are definitely in the word, then mentally change one to the other available options. This technique has worked for me multiple times, and it’s particularly helpful when the word in question is not an obvious one (like FJORD or ISLET).
What else should I know about Wordle?
Wordle launched in October 2021, but only grew in popularity towards the end of the year, then went viral in January as the world woke up to its charms. In fact, it proved so successful that The New York Times bought Wordle for a seven-figure sum in early February and the game is now part of NYT Games.
It’s played via the NYT Games website here (opens in new tab), and is entirely free. Both the NYT and the game’s creator, Josh Wardle, have stated that it will remain free. Some people think that Wordle has got harder since the NYT takeover, but it really hasn’t.
Wordle is a simple game in which your challenge is to guess a five-letter word in six attempts. Each time you guess, you’re told which of your chosen letters are in the target word, and whether they are in the right place.
If a letter is in the correct place, it turns green. If it’s in the word but in the wrong place, it turns yellow. And if it’s not in the word at all, it turns gray.
There’s just one puzzle a day, and everyone completes the same one. It resets at midnight each day. You’ll find more information about the game in our What is Wordle? article.
Wordle Alternatives
If you’re eager for another game to pass the time while you wait, we’ve put together a list of the best Wordle alternatives. We also have a page on today’s Quordle answers, because it’s our favorite, and also today’s Heardle answer — because that’s great too.
Other Wordle alternatives to try are the ultra-stressful (but very good) Squabble and the soccer-themed, Who Are Ya?. We also like the geography-based Wordle clone Worldle, the Star Wars-themed SWordle and the math-based Mathler.
There are certainly plenty of options once you’ve finished Wordle for the day!