The Contexto answer for Saturday, July 18, 2026 (game #1399) is SUPPER – a six-letter word whose semantic field spans the dinner table, the art history classroom, and the distinctly regional American debate over what to call the last meal of the day.
Hints (before the answer)
- This word names an evening meal, often the final one of the day.
It appears in the title of one of the most reproduced paintings in Western art history.
It shares its etymological root with a French word for a thin, liquid dish.
The Answer: SUPPER
SUPPER sits at the intersection of the mundane and the sacred in English. As a common noun, it names simply an evening meal – lighter than dinner in traditional British usage, synonymous with it across much of the American South and Midwest. As a proper noun in the phrase “the Last Supper,” it describes the meal Jesus shared with his apostles before the Crucifixion, immortalized in Leonardo da Vinci’s late-15th-century mural in Milan and reproduced across centuries of devotional and commercial art. Few six-letter English words carry that dual load: the everyday and the iconic.
In Contexto, words in SUPPER’s semantic orbit tend to cluster around two distinct neighborhoods. The meal-vocabulary neighborhood – DINNER, LUNCH, BREAKFAST, FEAST, BANQUET, MEAL – provides the closest semantic neighbors by word-vector distance, since Contexto’s algorithm weights co-occurrence across corpora. The religious and cultural neighborhood – COMMUNION, SACRAMENT, LAST, APOSTLE – surfaces slightly further out, reflecting how frequently SUPPER appears in those religious contexts without being defined by them.
Etymologically, SUPPER descends from Old French “soper,” meaning to eat an evening meal, itself derived from “soupe” – soup, specifically the broth into which bread was dipped at the end of a working day. The connection between SUPPER and SOUP is not metaphorical but literal: for much of medieval Europe, the evening meal was a bowl of bread-soaked broth. Solvers who approached through SOUP, STEW, or BROTH were tracking the word’s etymology forward through six centuries of usage.
Yesterday’s Contexto answer (game #1398) was ICON. Today’s Wordle #1855 answer for July 18, 2026 is BOOTH. The NYT Connections #1133 answers for July 18 and the NYT Strands #867 answers for July 18 are also live.
