Wordle Answer Today – Aug 18, 2026 (Puzzle #1886)

The Wordle answer today, Tuesday, August 18, 2026, is STRIP. That solves NYT Wordle puzzle #1886.

If you would rather work it out yourself, the hints below build up to it without giving the word away. The full explanation follows underneath.

Wordle Hints Today, August 18, 2026 (Puzzle #1886)

There is only one vowel, and it sits in the fourth position.
No letter appears twice.
The word begins with a three consonant cluster.
It works as both a verb and a noun, and the two senses feel unrelated until you think about them.
As a verb it means to remove a covering. As a noun it means a long narrow piece of something.

What Is the Wordle Answer Today, August 18, 2026?

Today’s Wordle answer is STRIP.

Why Wordle #1886 Catches Good Solvers

The interesting thing about STRIP is how generous it looks and how little it actually gives you.

STARE is one of the most common opening guesses in Wordle, and against this grid it lights up immediately. S, T and R all come back as present letters on the first try. Most solvers read three confirmed letters as being most of the way home. They are not. The STR opening is one of the most crowded starts in five letter English, and confirming it resolves almost none of the uncertainty in the word.

What is left after STR is a single vowel slot and a final letter, and that is where all the remaining information lives. STRAP, STRAY, STRUT, STROP and STRIA are all legitimate five letter words sharing that opening, and a solver who has burned two guesses admiring their confirmed consonants can easily spend the next two picking between them.

The ending is the second problem. STRIP closes on a P, which is an uncommon final letter in Wordle’s answer pool. Solvers tend to test E, Y, T and R at the end long before they reach for P, so the natural order of elimination works against this word rather than for it.

That makes for a sharp turn from Monday’s answer, TRIBE, which ended on the single most common final letter in the game. Two days, two words built on the same TR sound, and almost opposite difficulty profiles.

One small mercy: the double meaning is not a trap here. Whether you arrive at STRIP thinking of a runway, a comic, a strip of land or the verb, you are typing the same five letters.