Today’s intended Wordle solution pushed to 2027 due to “major recent news event”

The New York Times altered the Wordle solutions list to avoid an answer for a puzzle that was related to a recent news event.

Today's originally intended solution, FETUS, was first added to the game's word list last year, when Wordle creator Josh Wardle included it among the randomly ordered list of roughly 2,300 five-letter words intended to define the daily word game for years to come. The New York Times has pushed that term to the end of the game's solutions list, where it is now scheduled to appear sometime in late 2027 (it remains to be seen if today's news focus on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision will still be as much of a concern by then).

The Internet Archive has copies of the Wordle website that show the Times changing the puzzle on May 6. As such, players who have not refreshed the Wordle webpage in the last few days may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event, as the Times wrote.

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The updated version of the game will keep players out of sync if they don't refresh. The Times wrote that it has continued to discover challenges after acquiring the game for seven figures.

A sensitive subject

The original placement of FETUS was called "unintentional" and "coincidence" by the Times, and they want Wordle to remain distinct from the news. The Wordle technology makes it difficult to change words that have already been loaded into the game. When we discovered last week that this particular word would be featured today, we switched it for as many solvers as possible.

The word list is viewable by looking at the game's Javascript source code.

In February, the Times removed seven then-upcoming Wordle solutions (and 25 options for valid guesses) from the game's rotation, mostly to remove gendered or racial slurs from consideration. In late March, the company also pushed another 18 solutions to the back of the line, including VOMIT, FANNY, ECLAT, and FELLA.

In a recent earnings call, the Times said Wordle brought in tens of millions of new players and played an outsized role in the quarter's engagement and subscriber growth.