Wordle today, Sunday, August 16, 2026: the NYT Wordle answer for puzzle #1884 is ASPIC. It is one of the harder grids of the month, a five-letter noun most players know only from old cookbooks, with two vowels, no repeated letters, and a C in the final position that almost nobody reaches early.
If you would rather solve it yourself, the Wordle hints are below and the answer follows further down.
Wordle Hints Today, August 16, 2026 (Puzzle #1884)
- The word starts with A and ends with C.
- It contains exactly two vowels, in positions one and four, and no letter appears twice.
- It is a noun from the kitchen: a clear savory jelly, set with gelatin from meat or fish stock, used to glaze a dish or to hold one in a mold.
What Is Today’s Wordle Answer? NYT Wordle #1884 for August 16
The Wordle answer today is ASPIC.
The word came into English from the French aspic, which also means asp, the snake. The usual explanation is that the finished dish, cloudy and mottled with whatever had been suspended in it, resembled the variegated skin of a serpent. Aspic ran through European and American cooking for well over a century before falling out of fashion after the 1970s, when the practice of setting salmon, eggs and vegetables in a wobbling clear jelly stopped reading as elegant and started reading as a period piece.
Why Wordle #1884 Was So Hard
That obscurity is most of the difficulty. Solvers tend to arrive at the pattern well before the word: openers like CRANE and SLATE surface the A and the S but say nothing about the P or the C, and once the letter set narrows there is no common English word waiting as a fallback. Players who got to _SPIC often burned a guess or two hunting for a fifth letter before accepting that the A belongs in front.
The C ending compounds it. Five-letter English words ending in C are scarce, and the familiar ones, TONIC and PANIC and MAGIC and LOGIC, all take an O or an A in second position rather than an S. Anyone who had locked S into position two was working against the grain of the language and had very little to guess into.
Yesterday’s Wordle Answer
Yesterday’s Wordle for August 15, 2026 was LOOSE (#1883), a far friendlier word whose main trap was the double O that sent players through GOOSE, MOOSE and NOOSE before the opening consonant fell. ASPIC is the reverse, and streaks ended on it.
More NYT Puzzle Answers for August 16, 2026
Today’s NYT Strands answer is the spangram JOBTRAINING, on the theme “Learn by doing.” For the rest of the week’s grids, Saturday’s Connections #1161, Spelling Bee and Mini Crossword answers are all here, along with Quordle #1664.
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