Next Letter

These start with the right letter and have five distinct letters, but swapping one position gives too many other real answers. In hard mode that can eat every remaining guess.

1. The starting letter steps forward one place in the alphabet every day and wraps from Z to A. The sequence is anchored so that 7 September 2026 is F.
2. The full NYT allowed-guess list was filtered down to words with five different letters.
3. Any word with three or more same-position siblings in the answer list (FOUND, FIGHT, GRACE and friends) was dropped as a trap.
4. Four-letter words made plural with an S (MOTHS, FLAPS) were dropped too. A word ending in S stays only if its first four letters are not a word on their own (FOCUS, CHAOS).
5. The survivors were grouped by first letter and each group was shuffled once, with a fixed seed. That order is baked into the site and never changes.
6. Each time a letter comes around, its next word in the shuffled order is served. A letter recurs every 26 days, so a group of 440 words takes about 31 years to repeat.

Everything above runs inside a WebAssembly module compiled from Rust. Nothing leaves your browser.