Today’s Wordle hints – answer, clues and tips for game #788, Wednesday, August 16

It’s time for your daily round of Wordle hints, expertly crafted to help you keep your streak going even on the toughest of days. 

You might think that you don’t need any clues for Wordle today, but remember: failure in this game is only ever six guesses away.   

Below, you’ll find a selection of Wordle hints to guide you in the right direction. You don’t have to use them all, but there are five in total should you need them, covering vowels, starting letter, ending letter and more. And if you don’t have time to play at all, you can see the answer, too. 

Want more word-based fun? My Quordle today page contains hints and answers for that game, which remains the best of all the main Wordle alternatives.

SPOILER WARNING: Wordle hints and today’s answer are below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to see them.

Wordle hints (game #788) – clue #1 – Vowels

* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too). 

Wordle hints (game #788) – clue #2 – first letter

S is the most common starting letter in the game, featuring in 365 of Wordle’s 2,309 answers. In fact, it’s almost twice as likely to begin an answer as the next most common starting letter, C.

Wordle hints (game #788) – clue #3 – repeated letters

Repeated letters are quite common in the game, with 748 of the 2,309 Wordle answers containing one. However, it’s still more likely that a Wordle doesn’t have one.

Wordle hints (game #788) – clue #4 – ending letter

B is not a common ending letter for a Wordle word. In fact, it only occurs there 11 times in total across the game’s 2,309 original answers.

Wordle hints (game #788) – clue #5 – last chance

Still looking for more Wordle hints today? Here’s an extra one for game #788.

• Today’s Wordle answer is a cleaning action.

If you just want to know today’s Wordle answer now, simply scroll down – but I’d always recommend trying to solve it on your own first. We’ve got lots of Wordle tips and tricks to help you, including a guide to the best Wordle start words.

If you don’t want to know today’s answer then DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER BECAUSE IT IS PRINTED BELOW. So don’t say you weren’t warned!

Today’s Wordle answer (game #788)

Today’s Wordle answer (game #788) is… SCRUB.

This is another fairly difficult one, with an average score of 4.1 according to WordleBot. The word is common and the letters are common, but there are lots of similarly spelled words, and that directly affected my play. I escaped with a 3/6, but that owed a lot more to luck than to good play.   

I always start with STARE. It’s one of the best Wordle starting words, although not right at the very top; WordleBot rates it as the 17th best. But today, it performed better than most, giving me a green S and yellow R, and reducing my possible solutions to just 10. Of the best picks, only CARTE and CARET were better (each left eight).

So, I had a huge advantage today, and one that was further improved by the fact that a couple of those 10 options had been past Wordle answers. 

On my list were SCRUM, SCRUB, SHRUB, SHRUG, SYRUP, SURLY, SCOUR and SPRIG. The two I’d missed, according to WordleBot, were SCRIP and SCROD.

Now, I don’t have an amazing memory for previous answers, but a few do stick in my mind. SYRUP (game #617) was a relatively recent one that I definitely recalled, so I ruled that out. I also thought SCOUR had been a solution before, so put that on my ‘probably not’ list. But the rest I was less sure about – had SHRUB been an answer? Yes, as it turned out. Had SCRUB? No, as I was to find out.

I could have consulted a list – not least my own – but decided to see what fate dished up instead. I have nothing against people who do look at answer lists, it’s just something I tend to avoid (though I have done it on occasion).

So, my list was now SCRUM, SCRUB, SHRUB, SHRUG, SURLY and SPRIG. I nearly guessed SCRUB next, as it shared the SCRU- bit with SCRUM and the B ending with SHRUB, but I was still concerned that one or more of those answers had appeared before. So instead I went with SPRIG, which I was fairly sure hadn’t. That was wrong, but ruled out SHRUG and (unknown to me) also SCRIP.

So, I now had five: SCRUB, SCRUM, SURLY, SHRUB and SCROD. I still hadn’t thought of the latter, so was really picking from four. And I still had a nagging sense that SHRUB had been an answer before. 

So I went with SCRUB – the answer that seemed the most likely out of those options and that unlike SURLY would point the way to the right one if it was wrong. But it wasn’t: all five letters turned green and I gladly took my 3/6.  

How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.

Yesterday’s Wordle hints (game #787)

In a different time zone where it’s still Tuesday? Don’t worry – I can give you some clues for Wordle #787, too.

• Wordle yesterday had vowels in two places.

• The first letter in yesterday’s Wordle answer was I.

• There were no repeated letters in yesterday’s Wordle.

• The last letter in yesterday’s Wordle was X.

• Yesterday’s Wordle answer is a list.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #787)

Yesterday’s Wordle answer (game #787) was… INDEX.

Now, this is potentially a tough one. I say ‘potentially’, because as always it depends to an extent on what your starting word is, and of course on how you played it after that. But it certainly has some of the elements of a tricky Wordle.

Among them: the inclusion of an X, the third least common letter in the game ahead of only Q and J. Plus, X appears at the end of the word just eight times among Wordle’s 2,309 original solutions, so it’s really not an obvious thing to play. The last time we had this scenario? The infamous BORAX, game #662 (April 2023). 

The fact that it starts with I is also a potential problem, because you wouldn’t expect that either. I may be a common letter in the game overall, but it starts a mere 34 Wordles, placing it 19th in this regard. 

All of that contributes to this game having a high average score of 4.4, according to WordleBot – so, more than yesterday’s SNAKY plus other fairly difficult Wordles such as HELLO, BULLY and POLYP.

None of the best Wordle starting words were very helpful; SLATE left 329 possible solutions and my STARE left 249, for instance. The most successful of the popular choices was AUDIO, which reduced the options to 18. I still wouldn’t recommend picking this as your starter, because on average it won’t perform as well as many others, but today it did work out quite well.

With a single yellow E to go on, and 249 words still to filter, I had very little chance of scoring a 3/6 today. But little chance is not the same as no chance, and a combination of a wise choice and a lot of luck did the business, cutting those options to just one.

My second word was LINED – a word I regularly play when I have a yellow E, and which worked spectacularly well today. LINED confirmed the E in position #4 and also gave me a yellow I, N and D. I tried arranging them in various combinations and eventually realized they only really worked if I went with INDE-. It didn’t take long after that for me to play INDEX and score my 3/6.

Wordle answers: The past 50

I’ve been playing Wordle every day for more than a year now and have tracked all of the previous answers so I can help you improve your game. Here are the last 50 solutions starting with yesterday’s answer, or check out my past Wordle answers page for the full list.

• Wordle #787, Tuesday 15 August: INDEX
• Wordle #786, Monday 14 August: SNAKY
• Wordle #785, Sunday 13 August: WRATH
• Wordle #784, Saturday 12 August: QUICK
• Wordle #783, Friday 11 August: HELLO
• Wordle #782, Thursday 10 August: EMPTY
• Wordle #781, Wednesday 9 August: LOVER
• Wordle #780, Tuesday 8 August: BULLY
• Wordle #779, Monday 7 August: BROOK
• Wordle #778, Sunday 6 August: POLYP
• Wordle #777, Saturday 5 August: ANODE
• Wordle #776, Friday 4 August: CHART
• Wordle #775, Thursday 3 August: PARTY
• Wordle #774, Wednesday 2 August: BEGET
• Wordle #773, Tuesday 1 August: TENTH
• Wordle #772, Monday 31 July: STYLE
• Wordle #771, Sunday 30 July: BATHE
• Wordle #770, Saturday 29 July: CURLY
• Wordle #769, Friday 28 July: ETHOS
• Wordle #768, Thursday 27 July: DISCO
• Wordle #767, Wednesday 26 July: HEART
• Wordle #766, Tuesday 25 July: WHEEL
• Wordle #765, Monday 24 July: HOBBY
• Wordle #764, Sunday 23 July: WHALE
• Wordle #763, Saturday 22 July: FROZE
• Wordle #762, Friday 21 July: BURLY
• Wordle #761, Thursday 20 July: FLANK
• Wordle #760, Wednesday 19 July: TONIC
• Wordle #759, Tuesday 18 July: FLYER
• Wordle #758, Monday 17 July: DROOP
• Wordle #757, Sunday 16 July: TOPAZ
• Wordle #756, Saturday 15 July: CRONE
• Wordle #755, Friday 14 July: FIEND
• Wordle #754, Thursday 13 July: BARGE
• Wordle #753, Wednesday 12 July: WHIRL
• Wordle #752, Tuesday 11 July: EARTH
• Wordle #751, Monday 10 July: FOLLY
• Wordle #750, Sunday 9 July: ENTER
• Wordle #749, Saturday 8 July: COWER
• Wordle #748, Friday 7 July: DONUT
• Wordle #747, Thursday 6 July: WINDY
• Wordle #746, Wednesday 5 July: VENOM
• Wordle #745, Tuesday 4 July: IRATE
• Wordle #744, Monday 3 July: HOTEL
• Wordle #743, Sunday 2 July: MOSSY
• Wordle #742, Saturday 1 July: BLEEP
• Wordle #741, Friday 30 June: STRAW
• Wordle #740, Thursday 29 June: DINER
• Wordle #739, Wednesday 28 June: TRACT
• Wordle #738, Tuesday 27 June: ABOUT
• Wordle #737, Monday 26 June: GUEST

What is Wordle?

If you’re on this page then you almost certainly know what Wordle is already, and indeed have probably been playing it for a while. And even if you’ve not been playing it, you must surely have heard of it by now, because it’s the viral word game phenomenon that took the world by storm last year and is still going strong in 2023.

We’ve got a full guide to the game in our What is Wordle page, but if you just want a refresher then here are the basics.