Wordle Answer Today #1888 – Aug 20, 2026: MURKY

The Wordle answer today, Thursday, August 20, 2026, is MURKY, and puzzle #1888 will punish almost every popular opening word.

If you would rather solve it yourself, the hints come first and the answer follows below.

Wordle Hints Today, August 20, 2026 (Puzzle #1888)

Five letters, and only one of them is a standard vowel.
It starts with M and ends with Y.
No letter repeats.
The word is an adjective.
It describes water you cannot see through, or a past somebody would rather not discuss.

What Is the Wordle Answer Today? NYT Wordle #1888 for August 20

The Wordle answer today for puzzle #1888 is MURKY.

Why Wordle #1888 Beats the Standard Openers

The difficulty here is not the word. MURKY is ordinary English. The difficulty is that it contains neither A nor E, the two letters almost every recommended starting word is built around.

Run the usual openers against it and watch what comes back. SLATE returns nothing at all, five grey tiles. CRANE returns a single yellow R. RAISE does the same. ADIEU and AUDIO each surrender one yellow U and nothing else. A solver who opens with two of those and collects one yellow tile out of ten has spent a third of the game learning only that the word contains an R and a U somewhere in it.

That is the trap, and it is structural rather than a matter of vocabulary. The second guess usually doubles down on vowels, because a nearly blank board feels like it ought to be answered with more coverage. Here that is precisely wrong. Once U and R are on the board, the correct move is consonants: K, M, Y, P.

The ending finishes the job. Very few five-letter words close on RKY. PERKY, PORKY, JERKY, DORKY and MURKY are effectively the whole list, and a U in the second position eliminates all but one of them. Anyone who reaches the pattern _URKY has already won. The only question is how many guesses it cost to get there.

Y is the other quiet obstacle. It is doing vowel duty at the end of the word while U carries the only conventional vowel sound, so players counting vowels rather than sounds keep hunting for a second A, E, I or O that was never there.

Yesterday’s Wordle Answer

Yesterday’s puzzle, #1887 on August 19, was GRILL, which hid a repeated L. It also contained neither A nor E. Two days running, the NYT has quietly rewarded anyone willing to abandon their standard opener.