Today’s Wordle answer, Sunday, August 30, 2026, is INTEL.
Three hints if you have not guessed yet:
Hint 1: It is the word military personnel and intelligence agencies use for information gathered about an adversary or a situation — referenced in briefing rooms, news coverage, and field reports.
Hint 2: It is also the name of a semiconductor company founded in Mountain View, California in 1968, responsible for the processor architecture that powered personal computing for decades.
Hint 3: The word starts with a vowel and contains five entirely different letters — no letter appears more than once.
About today’s answer
INTEL as a common noun is a shortening of intelligence in its military and espionage sense. It entered everyday English through armed forces slang during the twentieth century and now appears in news coverage, political commentary, and crime dramas so routinely that it barely registers as technical vocabulary. “We need better intel on their position” fits equally well in a newspaper headline, a police procedural, or a corporate briefing.
As a proper noun, Intel Corporation was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. The company name contracted from Integrated Electronics — a compound that, like the company itself, had a long run in its original form before becoming shorthand for something larger. Moore is also the source of Moore’s Law, the observation that transistor density on integrated circuits doubles roughly every two years, which Intel’s roadmap helped prove for several decades.
The two meanings of INTEL — military information and semiconductor brand — have coexisted long enough that most people no longer consciously separate them. That shared cultural space makes today’s word one of the more resonant five-letter answers the game has offered this year.
For Wordle solvers, INTEL rewards conventional openers. The letters I, T, N, E, and L are all high-frequency in the game’s word list. Solvers who opened with CRANE scored an N in an unknown position; following with STILE or INEPT would quickly pinpoint the full cluster. Players who committed to unusual letters early — chasing Q, V, or Z — worked against today’s board. The typical solve ran three to four guesses for players using high-frequency starters.
Today’s difficulty sits in the moderate range. INTEL is familiar enough that most solvers who considered it could lock it in quickly. Its double meaning as brand name and common noun means almost everyone recognizes the word on sight. The challenge was arriving at it before guesses ran out if early attempts scattered across less common letters.
Wordle #1898 — how to play tomorrow
Wordle resets daily at midnight Eastern Time. Each player gets six guesses to identify a five-letter word, with color feedback after each attempt: green for a correct letter in the correct position, yellow for a correct letter in the wrong position, and grey for a letter absent from the word. Play Wordle on the New York Times site.
For recent answers: Wordle #1897 (August 29) was BLOOD, and Wordle #1896 (August 28) was TWEEN.
