The Wordle answer for Sunday, August 2, 2026 (game #1870) is PENAL.
Five hints before the reveal for solvers still working through it.
Hint 1: No repeated letters.
Hint 2: The word contains two vowels, in the second and fourth positions.
Hint 3: It relates to punishment, particularly the formal legal kind.
Hint 4: Its letters are an exact anagram of a word meaning a flat, rectangular section of a surface, wall, or door.
Hint 5: Colonies established to house transported criminals were described with this adjective.
Wordle Answer Today – August 2, 2026 (#1870)
The answer is PENAL: P-E-N-A-L. Of, relating to, or constituting punishment, especially punishment handed down through the legal system. The word appears in a set of compound expressions so well-worn they have entered standard legal and institutional vocabulary: penal code (a written body of criminal law), penal colony (a settlement used to house transported prisoners), penal servitude (imprisonment with hard labour), penal institution (a prison or correctional facility), and penal sum (the monetary forfeit specified in a bond).
The Latin root is poenalis, from poena, meaning punishment or penalty. That root spread widely through the languages of Western Europe. French rendered it as peine, which entered English as pain – the experience of suffering that punishment was designed to inflict. The word penalty shares the same ancestry, arriving in English through medieval Latin poenalitas. Punish itself traces to the same poena through a different French path. This makes PENAL, PENALTY, PAIN, and PUNISH etymological cousins, all descended from a single Latin noun for the cost of wrongdoing.
The penal colony is the most vivid historical application of the word. Britain transported approximately 165,000 convicted criminals to Australia between 1788 and 1868, establishing the penal settlements that became the foundation of several Australian states. France operated penal colonies in French Guiana – including the infamous Devil’s Island – from 1852 to 1953. The Russian Empire and Soviet Union used Siberia as a destination for penal exile across two centuries. The word in this compound carries the full weight of that institutional history.
P-E-N-A-L carries no repeated letters and places two vowels in positions two and four, with consonants at either end and the middle. The structural challenge is not the letters themselves – P, E, N, A, and L are all high-frequency and likely to appear in most standard openers – but their arrangement. The word is an exact anagram of PANEL (P-A-N-E-L) and PLANE (P-L-A-N-E), and the three words share all five letters in different orders. Solvers who guess PANEL as an early attempt will receive P green (position one confirmed), N green (position three confirmed), and L green (position five confirmed), with A and E both yellow – pointing directly to PENAL as the only rearrangement that satisfies those constraints. The anagram relationship is today’s defining puzzle mechanic: solvers who spot it solve quickly; those who iterate through other possibilities spend the extra guesses.
For more Wordle answers, see Wordle #1869 for August 1, 2026 (SLUSH) and Wordle #1868 for July 31, 2026 (PURSE).
