What’s the Answer and Best Hints for NYT Puzzle Number 1,863 on Sunday, July 26, 2026

Wordle fans searching for help with Sunday’s puzzle can find the full rundown of hints, clues and the confirmed solution below. Today’s puzzle, numbered 1,863 by The New York Times, offered a moderately tricky word that stumped some players relying on common vowel-heavy starting guesses.

Today’s Wordle answer

The solution to Wordle #1,863 for Sunday, July 26, 2026, is GRAPE.

The word is a common five-letter noun referring to a smooth-skinned fruit frequently used in winemaking, and it contains no repeated letters. According to the New York Times’ WordleBot tracking tool, the average player solved today’s puzzle in 3.9 guesses under the standard “easy” mode, or 3.8 guesses when playing under Wordle’s stricter “hard mode” rules, which require players to reuse any correctly identified letters in subsequent guesses.

Hints for players who haven’t solved it yet

For readers still working through today’s puzzle without wanting the answer spoiled outright, several outlets circulated a consistent set of clues throughout the day. The word contains two of the five vowels in the English alphabet. There are no repeated letters anywhere in the five-letter sequence. And the word includes three of the five most commonly used letters in the English language, a detail Wordle-tracking sites often cite to help players narrow down likely candidates without giving away the full solution.

A more direct thematic hint offered by several sites described the word as “a smooth-skinned fruit often used for making wine,” pointing players toward produce-related five-letter words before the reveal.

Why today’s puzzle tripped some players up

Wordle puzzles that follow common letter patterns can be deceptively difficult, and today’s was no exception. GRAPE belongs to a large family of five-letter words that follow a similar “consonant-R-A-consonant-E” structure, a pattern the New York Times has used repeatedly since Wordle’s rise to mainstream popularity in 2022. Recent Wordle solutions following that same general shape have included BRACE, BRAKE, BRAVE, CRANE, CRAVE, CRAZE, DRAPE, ERASE, GRACE, GRADE, GRAVE, GRAZE, FRAME and DRAKE, according to a running list of past Wordle answers compiled by puzzle trackers. That overlap means players who correctly identified the general letter pattern early still had more than a dozen plausible words to choose from before landing on the correct one, a common source of frustration in Wordle’s community-driven strategy discussions.

Puzzle sites that track daily Wordle solutions note that words sharing common suffixes or letter patterns tend to produce higher average guess counts across the player base, since early feedback can rule out individual letters without narrowing the field to a single obvious answer. Today’s 3.8-to-3.9 average guess count falls within a fairly typical range for Wordle, which generally sees average solve times cluster between 3.5 and 4.5 guesses depending on how common or obscure the day’s word is.

How Wordle works, for newer players

Wordle, created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 before being acquired by The New York Times, remains one of the most widely played daily word games in the world. Players get six attempts to guess a hidden five-letter word, with the game providing color-coded feedback after each guess: a green tile indicates a correct letter in the correct position, a yellow tile indicates a correct letter in the wrong position, and a gray tile indicates the letter does not appear in the word at all. The game resets once daily at midnight local time, giving all players worldwide the same puzzle to solve within a 24-hour window, a design choice widely credited with helping fuel the game’s viral spread through shared, spoiler-free results grids posted on social media.

Wordle strategy guides commonly recommend opening with a word containing a strong mix of common vowels and consonants — words such as CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU or STARE are frequently cited as strong starting guesses — to maximize the amount of information gained from the very first attempt.

Other NYT Games puzzles today

Wordle remains just one entry in the Times’ growing suite of daily puzzles, which has become a significant driver of the newspaper’s digital subscription business in recent years. Sunday’s lineup also included Connections, a category-sorting word puzzle; Connections: Sports Edition; Strands, a themed word-search style puzzle; and the Mini Crossword, a condensed daily crossword aimed at quick play sessions. Players looking for an additional challenge beyond Wordle also had access to Quordle, a popular Wordle spinoff not affiliated with the Times that requires solving four five-letter words simultaneously within nine total guesses, along with harder “Chill” and “Extreme” difficulty variants.

Looking ahead

With Sunday’s puzzle solved, attention among daily players typically shifts toward tracking recently used answers to sharpen strategy for future puzzles, since the Times avoids immediate word repeats. Puzzle-tracking sites maintain running lists of past Wordle solutions specifically to help players rule out recently used words when narrowing down guesses on especially difficult days.

For now, Wordle #1,863 closes out with GRAPE as the confirmed answer, a solve time in line with the puzzle’s typical difficulty range, and yet another reminder of how a shared, simple word game continues to draw a devoted daily audience nearly five years after its debut.