Wordle puzzle
Wordle puzzle

NEW YORK — The New York Times' Wordle started the week with a word from the garden. Puzzle No. 1969 calls for a gardening adjective that many players know but rarely type.

Players get six attempts to find a hidden five-letter word, and the puzzle resets at midnight local time. Wordle No. 1969 is the puzzle for Nov. 9, 2026.

If you want to solve it yourself, stop here. The hints come first and the full answer is further down.

How hard is it?

Guides rate Monday's word as moderate. One tracker listed the difficulty as medium.

Hints for Wordle No. 1969

These clues go from gentlest to most revealing.

The first hint is the type of word. It is an adjective used to describe soil.

The second hint covers the letters. The word has two vowels, counting only A, E, I, O and U, and no letter appears twice. The two vowels sit next to each other.

The third hint is about where you'd see it. You might find it in a description of soil for planting.

The fourth hint is the opening letter. The word starts with L.

The final hint is a definition. The word means consisting of or resembling soil with a mixture of sand, silt and clay.

Strategy tips

Monday's word rewards openers that hit common vowels. Forbes contributor Erik Kain said his opener, READY, left him with just eight possible words and two green boxes.

He then used a "burner" word to narrow things down. He played PLONK, though WordleBot would have chosen SLOTH, and either way he was left with only one possible solution.

The final letter offers a useful clue. Many five-letter adjectives end in Y, so players who confirm a Y at the end should test letter patterns like those in FOAMY, LEAFY or SANDY to pin down the rest of the word.

Today's Wordle answer

Spoiler warning: the solution follows.

The answer to Wordle No. 1969 on Nov. 9, 2026, is LOAMY.

LOAMY is an adjective meaning consisting of or resembling loam, a soil mixture of sand, silt and clay, as in "The garden has loamy soil."

The word has old roots. "Loamy" comes from loam plus -y, and loam derives from the Old English lām, meaning "clay" or "earth," from a Germanic root.

Gardeners prize this kind of soil because it holds moisture and nutrients while still draining well. That makes it ideal for growing vegetables, flowers and lawns.

The opening letter is relatively uncommon. Eighty of the 1,969 Wordle answers to date start with the letter L.

Recent Wordle answers

Recent solutions were FIRST on Nov. 8, PRATE on Nov. 7, DRECK on Nov. 6 and PARCH on Nov. 5.

How Wordle works

Players get six tries to guess a hidden five-letter word. After each guess, the tiles change color: green means the letter is correct and in the right spot, yellow means it is in the word but in the wrong position, and gray means it is not in the word.

A new puzzle comes out at midnight in each player's time zone. Wordle No. 1970 arrives Tuesday.