Past Letter Boxed Answers: Yesterday & Every Solution

About This Archive of Letter Boxed Answers

This page lists every past NYT Letter Boxed answer since January 1, 2025, newest first. Yesterday's board and official solution wait on the ticket at the top; every earlier day is grouped by month, and recent days open a page with the board, NYT's own two-word answer and every other two-word solution the day allowed.

Everything comes from the New York Times' own puzzle data: the twelve letters, the par, the editor's official solution and the full dictionary of words the game accepted that day. The dictionary is what makes this archive different. Instead of listing one answer, we test every pair of accepted words against the board, so each day shows exactly how many two-word Letter Boxed answers were possible — and which ones were shortest.

The search box looks through every official solution and the shortest two-word pairs, so you can check whether a word has turned up before. For today's board, with hints that start from a single letter, go to Letter Boxed answers today.

How Letter Boxed Works

Letter Boxed, edited by Sam Ezersky, puts twelve letters around the four sides of a square, three to a side. You build words by drawing lines from letter to letter, with three rules:

1. Alternate sides. Two letters in a row can't come from the same side of the box.
2. Chain your words. Each new word must start with the last letter of the word before.
3. Use every letter. The puzzle is solved once all twelve letters have been used at least once.

Words must be at least three letters long, and only words in the day's dictionary count — which is why some perfectly good English words are rejected. Par is the number of words the puzzle sets as its target; anything at or under par is a win.

Why Every Official Answer Is Two Words

Scroll the list and you'll notice the official Letter Boxed answer is always a pair of words, even on days when par is five or six. That's the puzzle's hidden challenge: par is generous, but the editor always shows that two words were enough.

How hard that is to match varies enormously. Some boards are packed with options — the busiest day in this archive allowed nearly three thousand different two-word solutions — while on more than a third of days there were five pairs or fewer in the whole dictionary, and a typical day has about a dozen. The day pages show the count for each board, so you can tell whether you missed an easy pair or the official answer really was the only elegant route.

Two patterns explain most of the difference. Boards with common letters on every side (E, R, S, T, A) leave many routes open. Boards with an awkward letter — Q, X, Z, J or a second Y — force every solution through the few words that use it — and the official answer has to go through one of them too.

The Hardest and Easiest Boards in the Archive

The two-word count is the best difficulty rating Letter Boxed has, and it swings from one extreme to the other. On roughly one day in seven, the official answer was the only two-word solution in the entire dictionary. Recent examples include FOXHOUND – DIAGRAM (October 16, 2026), QUILTING – GOCHUJANG (October 26), KERCHIEF – FLORIDITY (November 2) and BLOWUP – PHARYNX (November 7). On days like those, finishing in two means finding exactly the pair the editor found.

At the other end, July 22, 2025 is the most generous board in the archive: its letters allowed 2,885 different two-word Letter Boxed answers. The official one was QUARTILES – SNOB — a nice coincidence for anyone who also plays Apple's word game of the same name. When a board looks impossible, check its page here: if the count is one, it really was that hard.

How We Count Two-Word Solutions

Each day's official data includes the dictionary the game uses for that board — every word it will accept, typically around a thousand of them, though some boards allow a few hundred and others several thousand. We take every pair of those words in which the second starts with the first one's last letter, and keep the pairs that use all twelve letters between them. Because the dictionary already only contains words that follow the side-to-side rule, every pair we count is one the game would have accepted.

The shortest pairs are listed on each day's page, so you can compare your own two-word attempt with the most compact possible answer.

What Past Letter Boxed Answers Teach You

• Start from the awkward letter. Every solution has to use the board's rarest letter somewhere, so find the few words that contain it before anything else — one of them is almost certainly half of the answer.
• Plan the link letter. The second word starts with the first word's last letter. In official solutions the most common link letters are S, E and T, because so many words both end and start with them.
• Think in endings. The endings that turn up most in official solutions are -ING, -ED and -LY — short, flexible tails that let a long word finish on a useful link letter.
• Check what you missed. If you finished in three, open the day's page and look at the shortest two-word pairs — that's the fastest way to learn the board shapes that allow them.

Want to practise on an old board? Type its twelve letters into our Letter Boxed solver to see every word that fits, or to check an idea before you commit to it.

Letter Boxed Answer Yesterday: Getting the Right Board

A new Letter Boxed puzzle goes live at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, later than Wordle or Connections. So if you're checking “yesterday's” answer in the small hours of the morning in the US, the board you played may still be today's — compare its letters with the sides shown on the ticket above, or with the Sides column in the week table beside it.

Every past board also has its letters listed side by side, which makes it easy to recognise a puzzle you played without remembering its date.

Past Letter Boxed Answers FAQ