The Wordle answer pool: what’s left, and what NYT quietly added

Wordle shipped with a hand-curated list of 2,309possible answers — deliberately ordinary words, with the obscure and the offensive stripped out. It is widely assumed the New York Times still draws from that list. They don’t, and the exceptions explain a feeling every regular player knows: the morning you finish the puzzle and think, that was a word?

NYT has gone off-list 44 times

Of the 1,631 distinct answers published so far, 44 were not in the original pool at all. And it is not a rounding error from the early days — it is accelerating.

Off-list answers per year. The current year is partial.

The added words are measurably stranger

This is the part that matches the feeling. Using a standard word-frequency measure — higher means more common in everyday English — the off-list answers sit well below the ones drawn from the original pool:

So when a puzzle ends on a word you’d swear was invented, the odds are good it came from outside the list Wordle was built on. Every off-list answer so far:

722 pool words have never come up

The flip side: 722 of the original 2,309have still never been the answer. The surprise is how ordinary some of them are — these are among the most common English words never yet used:

Why this matters for your opener

Every solver that ranks starting words does so against the original 2,309-word list, because that is the list everyone has. As NYT drifts away from it, those rankings get quietly less accurate. Our starting word backtester scores against the original pool plus every answer actually used since, which is the closest thing to the real candidate set that exists. The broader letter-level breakdown lives on the statistics page.