ALIBI Tests Players With a Tricky Double Letter

Sunday’s Wordle puzzle served up a five-letter word rooted in courtroom and crime-drama vocabulary, challenging solvers with a tricky repeated letter that proved harder to pin down than the puzzle’s relatively common vowel pattern might have suggested.

The Answer

Today’s Wordle answer on Sunday, June 21, 2026, is ALIBI. Today’s answer refers to the state of having been elsewhere at a given time — a five-letter noun that starts with A, has three vowels, two consonants, and has one repeated letter.

Hints Offered Before the Reveal

Ahead of revealing the solution, puzzle outlets offered solvers a series of progressive clues designed to help them work toward the answer independently. There are three vowels in today’s five-letter word. Today’s Wordle begins with a vowel. There are double letters in today’s Wordle.

One outlet framed its hint around the word’s everyday usage in a more conversational way. A hint for today’s Wordle is: “Where were you last Saturday at 11:47am?” — a clue pointing directly toward the concept of needing to account for one’s whereabouts, the very definition at the heart of Sunday’s answer.

A Word Built Around a Tricky Repeated Letter

The puzzle’s defining challenge centered on its single repeated letter, a feature that frequently trips up solvers who eliminate a letter from consideration too early after testing it just once. Wordle answers sometimes use the same letter twice, as in words like SHEEP or BLOOM, so solvers are generally advised not to rule out repeats too quickly just because they’ve tried a letter once.

That guidance applied directly to Sunday’s puzzle, given that ALIBI contains the letter “I” twice — a pattern that can confuse players who assume a letter has already been accounted for once it turns up in one position on the board.

General Strategy for Approaching Difficult Puzzles

Beyond the specific letter-repetition trap embedded in Sunday’s answer, puzzle strategists continue to recommend a consistent set of broader principles for navigating Wordle’s daily challenge regardless of the particular word involved. If a player is down to their last two guesses, it’s best to avoid wild guesses and instead opt for words that fit all known rules established by prior feedback. The first two or three guesses, by contrast, can be used more freely in an effort to eliminate as many unused letters as possible before narrowing down toward a final answer.

How Saturday’s Puzzle Compared

Sunday’s ALIBI solution followed directly on the heels of Saturday’s answer, which proved to be a notably different kind of challenge for solvers. The Wordle answer for June 20, 2026, was DRAKE — a word that, despite its common letters, required players to work through a deceptively large pool of remaining candidate words even after securing several letters in the correct position.

The Game’s Origins and Basic Rules

Wordle is a web-based word puzzle game that was created by Josh Wardle in 2021. After surging in popularity, it was acquired by The New York Times. The game’s objective is simple: guess a hidden five-letter English word within six attempts.

To play, solvers go to the official Wordle website and start by typing any valid five-letter word. The game then provides feedback based on which letters appear in the word and where, with letters changing color to give players clues: green indicates a letter is in the word and in the correct position, while a different color indicates a letter is present but placed incorrectly.

A Broader Ecosystem of Daily Word Games

Wordle’s continued popularity five years after its creation has helped fuel an entire ecosystem of companion puzzles, both from The New York Times and from independent outlets seeking to capture some of the same daily habit-forming appeal. Similarly to Wordle, other word games hosted by The New York Times are equally popular, including Spelling Bee, Connections, and the publication’s traditional crossword puzzles, each offering its own distinct format and style of daily challenge.

Looking Back at Recent Puzzles

For players looking to track recent solutions or simply curious about patterns in the game’s word selection, puzzle outlets continue to maintain running archives of previous answers, allowing solvers to rule out recently used words when forming their opening guesses. Players who didn’t manage to guess Sunday’s puzzle shouldn’t worry, as there’s always next time, with past puzzles remaining available to play through the official Wordle archive for anyone wanting additional practice.

With Sunday’s ALIBI now solved by players around the world, attention turns to Monday’s puzzle, numbered 1829, as the Wordle community continues its now five-year-old daily ritual of collective guessing, occasional frustration, and the small, satisfying triumph of cracking the code in as few attempts as possible — a habit that shows no sign of fading nearly half a decade after the game first captured widespread public attention.