Spellie Answer Today — Saturday, October 24, 2026

What Spellie is

Spellie is a daily word game built for children, and it has been running since February 2022. It borrows the shape of Wordle, six guesses at a hidden word with colored feedback after each attempt, and then changes the parts that make Wordle difficult for a young speller. The spell checker is a setting that can be switched off, the keyboard is alphabetical by default rather than the familiar QWERTY layout, and the board uses a rounded, high-contrast style built for young readers.

The feature that matters most for this page is the one that is easiest to overlook: Spellie does not publish a single daily answer. It publishes three, one for each difficulty, and all three run at the same time on the same day. A family with children of different ages can sit down together and each play at their own level without waiting for a separate puzzle. That is also why the searches for this game split by difficulty. People are not looking for "the Spellie answer" in the singular, they are looking for the Easy word, or the Medium word, or the Hard word, because that is the one they were stuck on.

The game is free, needs no account, and runs entirely in the browser. It was created by Christopher Porter, David Hirtle and James Dodds, and it is made in Canada. None of that changes what the answer is on a given day, but it explains the vocabulary: the words are the ones a Canadian primary school reader is likely to meet, spelled the way that reader would spell them.

The three daily difficulties

The three puzzles are not three settings of one puzzle. Each difficulty has its own answer list, its own word length, and its own vocabulary ceiling. A word that appears on Hard will not appear on Easy, and the three lists are maintained separately in the game's source.

Easy is a four-letter word from the Grade 2 band. Four letters is short enough that a child can hold the whole word in mind while working through the feedback, and the answer pool is built from words that a second-grade reader has probably met in a book. Every Easy answer in the current list is exactly four letters, with no exceptions, which is worth knowing before you start: a four-letter guess is always the right length, so the only question is which letters are in it.

Medium is five letters and sits between the other two. The game names Grade 2 for Easy and Grade 5 for Hard but does not put a number on Medium itself, which is usually treated as a third-grade band. It is the puzzle most players gravitate to once four letters stops being a challenge but six still feels long. The current Medium list is entirely five-letter words. That was not always true. Across the first 337 days of the game, 69 of the Medium answers were four letters, and a handful of players still remember the surprise of a short word on a five-letter day. Since January 2023 the list has been uniform.

Hard is six letters at a Grade 5 vocabulary. Six letters gives you more to work with and more ways to be wrong at the same time. The current Hard list is entirely six-letter words, though those same first 337 days included 155 five-letter answers on Hard, so older archive entries can look shorter than the rule suggests. If you are checking a date from 2022, expect the older pattern.

How the game picks each day's word

There is no server deciding the answer. Spellie is a static site, and the complete answer lists ship inside one JavaScript file that every visitor downloads. That file is public/puzzles.js, and it is public, unminified and readable. The words are stored as base64 strings, which keeps them out of a casual page-source search but does not encrypt them: decoding is a single function call, and every word in this article was read that way.

The mapping from a date to a word is short enough to state in full. The game defines a fixed start date of February 10, 2022. It counts whole days from that date to today, which gives an integer index. Index 0 is the launch day. Index 1 is the next day, and so on. For 2026, that index is in the 1,400s: October 23, 2026 works out to index 1,716, a number you can reproduce by counting days from the start date.

The index is then resolved against three things, in order. First, if the index is below 337, the game returns the entry at that position in a historical list, one list per difficulty. Those 337 entries are frozen: the project's own test suite asserts that the puzzle for January 10, 2023 is still the same word it was on the day it ran, so a historical answer can never change under you. Second, if the date carries a holiday override, the game returns a holiday word, which is why Halloween and Christmas do not follow the normal rotation. Third, if neither applies, the game takes the future list and indexes into it with the index minus 337, taken modulo the length of that list.

That third step is the part that makes the puzzle repeat. The modulo means the future list wraps around and starts again at the beginning once it runs out. The wrap is silent: there is no announcement, no reset, and no puzzle number in the interface to tell you that you have seen a word before. The only visible effect is that a word you remember from a year ago comes back around.

Why the lists have the lengths they do

The historical lists hold 337 words each, which is why the frozen period ends on January 12, 2023. The future lists are longer but not the same length as each other: 491 words for Easy, 507 for Medium and 407 for Hard. Those three numbers are the cycle lengths, and they are the single most useful fact on this page if you want to know when a word will return.

An Easy answer repeats every 491 days. A Medium answer repeats every 507 days, and a Hard answer every 407 days. The cycles are independent, so the same combination of three words does not come back for a very long time. The least common multiple of 491, 507 and 407 is 101,317,359 days, which is roughly 277,000 years. In practical terms, the triple you played today has never appeared before and will not appear again.

A holiday override can interrupt a scheduled return. If a word is due on a date that the game has reserved for a holiday word, the holiday wins, the regular word is skipped that day, and its next appearance moves to the following cycle. That is a small effect, a handful of dates a year, but it is the reason two answer trackers can disagree on a holiday without either of them being wrong about the rotation.

Which time zone the puzzle changes in

This is the detail that causes the most confusion, and Spellie handles it differently from most daily puzzles. The start date is constructed as a local date in the visitor's own browser, and today's date is read the same way. The difference between them is divided by the number of milliseconds in a day and rounded down. The practical result is that each device rolls over at its own local midnight, not at a single global moment.

There is one wrinkle. Because the start date is anchored to a local calendar date rather than to a fixed UTC instant, daylight saving shifts the boundary by an hour. In a time zone that observes daylight saving, the new puzzle can appear at 1:00 a.m. local rather than at midnight while summer time is in effect, and at midnight once standard time returns. We confirmed this by running the game's own function against fixed instants: in Eastern Time during daylight saving, the index advances at 05:00 UTC, which is 1:00 a.m. local, and in winter it advances at 05:00 UTC, which is midnight local.

For this page we date each answer by its calendar date in America/Toronto, the Eastern time zone that covers most of the game's Canadian audience. That matches the dates other trackers publish. If you are in Asia or Australia, your device may still be showing the previous day's word while this page shows the new one. That is not a contradiction: the calendar date is the same, the local midnight is not.

Yesterday and tomorrow

Yesterday's answer is simply the previous index, and it is worth keeping because a missed day is common. Spellie has no streak to protect and no score to lose, but children notice when they skip a day, and a parent who wants to walk through the puzzle afterwards needs the word.

Tomorrow's answer is derived the same way, one index forward. It is available because the answer list is already in the bundle; nothing has to be predicted. We publish it for a practical reason. Search interest in these words is not concentrated on the day itself. People look up "spellie answer today wednesday" on a Wednesday and then look up the same phrase with a different weekday a few days later, and a page that only ever shows one date cannot satisfy that.

Showing tomorrow does spoil it, and it is fair to say so plainly. If you are playing with a child who has not seen the word yet, the answer is one scroll away from the yesterday row. The archive table further down has the same property for every day of the year. This page exists so that the answer is available when it is wanted, not to protect anyone from it.

How these answers are checked

A page like this is only worth anything if the words are right, so the method is worth stating. Three separate checks sit behind the sentence at the top of the page.

The first is the source itself. The deployed bundle at spelliegame.com is byte-identical, by SHA-256 hash, to the copy in the project's public repository, canadianveggie/spellie. That means the code we read is the code that ships, and it means there is a second, independently hosted copy of the same data if the game's own site is unreachable.

The second is the game's own regression test. The repository asserts a specific date and word pair for the frozen historical period. Our mapping reproduces it, which confirms that the index arithmetic and the epoch are read correctly, not merely that they are self-consistent.

The third is an external comparison. We resolved six dates and matched them against a separately published daily answer record: four dates captured from an archived third-party page on the day it was published, and two recent dates read live. All six matched, across February, June and October 2026. That is the check that matters most, because it exercises the modulo, the holiday table and the date arithmetic at points we did not choose ourselves.

Playing Easy well

Four letters is a different game from five. The answer pool is small, the words are common, and the feedback you get from a first guess is unusually informative because there are so few letters to distribute. A good opening guess on Easy does not try to cover the alphabet. It tries to place vowels, because a four-letter word almost always contains one and often two, and because a vowel in the right position narrows the remaining choices more than a consonant does.

The second guess should usually test a new vowel rather than a new consonant, unless the first guess already placed one. If your first guess comes back with a single amber vowel, you have learned that the vowel is in the word and not where you put it, which is a strong constraint on four letters. Move it to a different position and add a common consonant in the same guess.

Watch for consonant clusters. Four-letter English words lean heavily on a small set of endings and pairs, and once you have two greens in place the remaining two letters are often a pair you already know. The most common mistake on Easy is overthinking: the answer is a Grade 2 word, so if a candidate is obscure, it is probably not the answer. If a plain, everyday word fits every piece of feedback, play it.

Repeated letters are rarer on Easy than players expect but not absent. A word like FEED uses the same letter twice, and a guess with a single E will only turn one tile green. If the feedback looks impossible, with a letter you know is in the word refusing to light up, consider that the answer may hold two copies of it.

Playing Medium well

Five letters is the length most word-game players have the most practice with, which cuts both ways. You will have stronger instincts about which words are plausible, and you will also have stronger habits that may not fit a Grade 3 vocabulary. A word can be a perfectly good five-letter answer in another game and still be outside this pool, so do not spend guesses on words a nine-year-old would not know.

The opening guess matters more here than on Easy because there are more possible answers. Two vowels and three common consonants is the usual shape of a strong start. After that, the discipline is to use every guess to test something you do not already know. A guess that repeats letters you have already confirmed is a wasted turn, and on five letters you only get six turns.

Medium is also where the difference between a green and an amber starts to matter strategically. An amber tells you the letter is present, which is often more valuable early than a green, because it does not pin the letter to a position you might later want to change. A single amber vowel can rule out a large family of words in one step.

If you are stuck with two greens and no clear candidate, work the ending. Five-letter words cluster around a small number of final patterns, and testing a plausible ending is often faster than testing a new vowel. Write down the greens, write the vowels you have eliminated, and read the remaining pattern out loud. The word is usually one you know.

Playing Hard well

Six letters at a Grade 5 vocabulary is the version of Spellie that adults play, and it is genuinely harder than a five-letter puzzle for a reason that has nothing to do with vocabulary. Six letters means more positions to satisfy, more possible arrangements, and a longer path from a partially correct guess to the answer. The words are also longer in the ordinary sense, with more syllables and more internal structure.

The strongest opening on Hard covers three vowels if it can, because longer words are more likely to contain two or three different vowels. Consonant-heavy openings feel productive and often are not, since they tell you about letters that were unlikely to be repeated anyway.

Use the middle guesses to test structure rather than letters. Once you have two or three confirmed letters, the question stops being "which letters are in this word" and becomes "which word has these letters in these places". That is a different search, and it is the one where a six-letter answer becomes tractable. Say the pattern out loud with blanks in it. The ear often finds the word before the reasoning does.

Do not neglect the possibility of a compound or a word with a common suffix. Hard answers include words built from shorter pieces, and a suffix like -ER or -ING can account for two or three letters at once. If your greens sit at the front of the word, the ending is the part you have not tested, and a guess aimed at the ending is usually the best use of a turn.

Using the checker without spoiling the puzzle

The checker on this page compares your guess with the answer that is already printed above it, so it cannot spoil anything that is not already spoiled. That makes it a different kind of tool from a solver. It does not search for the answer, it shows you what the game would have shown you, which is useful in three situations.

The first is a disagreement. If you believe a letter should have turned green and the game did not agree, the checker will tell you whether the letter is really in that position. The second is a repeated letter. Duplicate handling is the part of Wordle-style feedback that people most often get wrong by hand, and running the guess through the checker settles it. The third is practice. If you want to show a child how the feedback works without starting a real puzzle, typing a few guesses against today's answer is a quick demonstration.

What the checker will not do is tell you the answer for a difficulty you have not selected, and it will not accept a word of the wrong length. That is deliberate. A four-letter guess on Hard is not a guess, and returning feedback for it would teach the wrong habit.

Spellie compared with other daily word games

The obvious comparison is Wordle, and the differences are mostly about who the game is for. Wordle has one answer a day, five letters, a fixed dictionary, and a shared result that people post in the same format. Spellie has three answers a day, four to six letters, a spell checker you can switch off, and no shared result format that has taken over a social network. Wordle is a puzzle you discuss with strangers. Spellie is a puzzle you do with a child at the kitchen table.

That changes the design in ways that matter. Wordle's dictionary is fixed and the game does not explain why a word was refused. Spellie puts its spell checker in the settings, on by default but switchable off, and it checks the final guess whether the setting is on or not. For an adult the difference is small. For a child, being able to turn the checker off while practising is the difference between a game that stops them and a game that lets them spell a word out and see what happens.

Compared with other family-friendly daily games, Spellie's distinguishing feature is the three-tier structure. Most daily word games pick one difficulty and ask everyone to play it. Having three answers on the same day, each from its own list, is unusual, and it is the reason this page has to show three words instead of one. If you want the five-letter version of the same daily habit, the Wordle answer page covers it, and the Canuckle answer page covers the Canadian five-letter game with a similar daily rhythm.

If you are looking for tools rather than answers, the Wordle solver works on the same colored-feedback logic as the checker above, and the five-letter word list is the reference for the middle difficulty's word length. The word games hub lists everything else on the site, and the Spellie game page covers how to play if you have not started yet.

October 2026 answers

The table below is the running record for October, newest last. It is built from the same source as the sentence at the top of the page and it is regenerated every time the answers are refreshed, so a row cannot drift out of step with the day it belongs to. Dates before the first of the month are in the data file that powers the lookup box.

Two things are worth noticing in that table. The first is that no word repeats within the month, on any difficulty. That is normal: the shortest cycle is 407 days, so a repeat inside a single month is not possible unless a holiday override creates one. The second is that the three columns move independently. Easy and Medium can both start with the same letter on the same day by coincidence, and it means nothing.

Questions people ask about Spellie answers

Most of the confusion around this game comes from the three-difficulty structure and from the way the answer list loops. These are the questions that come up most often.