Tom's Wordle Hint Today Is Puzzle #1,823's Answer AMAZE?

You've opened a new tab before the first coffee is finished. The grid is staring back. You're not ready to guess blind, and you're definitely not ready to lose the streak. Smart call coming here first.

NYT Wordle #1,823 is live for Tuesday, June 16, 2026, and today's word comes with a deceptive combination a repeated vowel and one of the rarer letters in the English alphabet sitting right in the middle. Tom's Guide's daily Wordle coverage places the NYT WordleBot average at 4.5 moves in easy mode and 4.4 on hard rules and describes today's answer as one that most players found genuinely tough to crack.

Below you'll find the clues you need, the full reveal when you're ready for it, plus today's Connections and Strands answers with the tricky words explained. Spoilers are clearly flagged before they appear.

Wordle Hints for June 16, 2026 Puzzle #1,823

Work through these one at a time. Stop whenever you feel ready to go back to the grid.

Clue 1 First letter: The answer begins with A.

Clue 2 Last letter: The word ends with E.

Clue 3 Vowel count: Only two distinct vowels appear in the word, but together they fill three of the five letter positions.

Clue 4 Repeated character: One of those two vowels appears twice. It is a vowel, not a consonant.

Clue 5 Rare letter warning: The answer contains a Z. This letter appears infrequently enough in Wordle's solution pool that most standard opening guesses will never surface it. If you haven't tried it, this is the moment.

Clue 6 Meaning: Merriam-Webster defines today's word as a verb meaning "to fill with wonder" or "to show or cause astonishment." A less common noun form also exists, carrying the sense of amazement itself. Cambridge Dictionary puts it plainly: to cause someone to feel extreme surprise.

Clue 7 Word type: It functions primarily as a verb. You would use it to describe what a magician does to a crowd or what a comeback win does to a stadium.

If those seven clues haven't closed the gap, here is one more: think about the moment when something leaves you completely speechless not from confusion, but from sheer delight.

Today's Wordle Answer Full Spoiler Ahead

Stop scrolling here if you still want to solve it yourself.

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Today's Wordle #1,823 answer for June 16, 2026 is: AMAZE.

According to Tom's Guide, contributor Alan Martin solved puzzle #1,823 in four moves. His path ran ORATE > SCALE > IMAGE > AMAZE. Starting with ORATE left 51 possible answers still live. After SCALE, that number fell to 13. IMAGE brought it close enough to land AMAZE on the final guess.

TechRadar's Marc McLaren, who uses SANER as his regular opener, reports that starting word left 105 possible answers on the board a high number that reflects how well today's answer hides from common letter patterns. TechRadar's Wordle tracker puts the NYT player average score for puzzle #1,823 at 4.4 moves a figure consistent with Tom's Guide's own description of today's answer as one most players found rather tough. The WordleBot recommended opener SLATE reportedly trims the starting list to 31.

The repeated A in AMAZE is the part that catches people off-guard. Players scanning for the Z often miss that the A appears in both the first and third positions, which eliminates a large chunk of the remaining options once spotted.

For comparison, yesterday's Wordle #1,822 on June 15, 2026 was BROIL.

NYT Connections #1,101 Hints and Full Answers for June 16

Once Wordle is done, NYT Connections #1,101 is the next challenge on the board. Today's puzzle groups 16 words into four categories and the purple group, as usual, is designed to make you second-guess yourself at least once.

Here are all four groups for June 16, verified by Times of India and WordTips:

The words that trip people up:

RETINUE is the green group's hardest tile. Merriam-Webster defines retinue as a body of retainers or attendants a group of people following or surrounding someone of rank. That's why it slots in with COURT, ENTOURAGE, and SUITE, all of which can describe the people gathered around a prominent figure.

GREEN GODDESS belongs in the yellow group, not the blue one. It refers to a creamy, herb-based salad dressing made with tarragon, chives, and anchovy placing it firmly alongside RANCH, BLUE CHEESE, and CAESAR. If you filed it somewhere else on first instinct, you were not alone.

The blue group is where the puzzle turns philosophical. Each phrase signals rarity in a different register. A black swan is an event previously considered impossible or at least highly improbable. Once in a blue moon means very rarely, almost never. A perfect storm describes a catastrophic situation caused by a powerful convergence of factors. And a unicorn in modern usage means something impossibly rare the kind of thing people spend years hunting without finding.

The purple group is built around multiple readings of the word "hoops." BASKETBALL is the most direct. Hoop earrings match the shape. RHYTHMIC GYMNASTICS GEAR includes the literal hoop used in competition. RED TAPE earns its place through the phrase "jumping through hoops" the bureaucratic obstacle course that phrase describes so well.

NYT Strands #835 Theme, Spangram, and All Answers

NYT Strands #835 for June 16 asks a question that might hit differently depending on how hungry you are right now: "For here or to go?"

The spangram the long linking phrase that spans the full board and defines the day's theme is WHATSFORLUNCH. Both TechRadar's Strands guide and Parade confirm it. The phrase is 13 letters long and runs from the top of the board's first column down to the bottom of the third.

The theme words are a full lunch-counter spread: WRAP, SANDWICH, GYRO, RAMEN, SALAD, SOUP, TACOS.

For anyone still new to Strands it's NYT's themed word-search game with a twist. Hidden words all connect to a central concept, and the spangram is the bonus word that tells you the theme. Find all the theme words and the spangram goes golden.

A Quick Note on NYT Pips

NYT Pips is the newest game in the NYT Games family as of 2026. The Apple App Store listing describes it as a domino logic puzzle where players place dominoes in a grid while satisfying region constraints conditions like "these tiles must sum to X" or "this tile must be greater than its neighbor." Three difficulty levels run each day: Easy, Medium, and Hard.

A full verified board solution for today's Pips puzzles was outside the scope of this article's sourcing. WordTips' Pips page covers today's Easy, Medium, and Hard puzzles if you want to take that route.

How a Side Project Became a Daily Ritual

It's worth pausing on how unusual Wordle's story is. Josh Wardle built the game privately for his partner during the COVID-19 pandemic. It went public in October 2021. Within a few months, millions of people were sharing colored squares every morning. The New York Times moved fast: Reuters reported in January 2022 that the Times acquired Wordle for an undisclosed price in the low seven-figure range.

Since then, Wordle has settled into the center of a growing NYT Games ecosystem alongside Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, The Mini Crossword, and Pips. The NYT Games app on iOS stores over 10,000 past puzzles in its archive for subscribers a number that puts years of daily puzzle history at your fingertips.

Millions of people play Wordle every day NYT Games reported tens of millions of daily players across its puzzle suite in 2025 and the daily wave of searches for tom's wordle hint today tells you something worth noticing people are not just playing these puzzles. They are playing them together, in parallel, with a shared understanding that a clue or two is part of the game, not a shortcut away from it.

The streak survives. Tomorrow's grid resets at midnight.