Wordle answer (Thursday 28 July 2022): Wordle word of the day #404 and hints

Looking for the Wordle answer for Thursday 28 July 2022? Did you know that on this day, 481 years ago, King Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day as he executed his former chancellor, Thomas Cromwell? And then a year or two later he also executed Catherine Howard. Angry man, old Henry. Perhaps if he'd had Wordle in his life, he could have found a more constructive outlet than simply lopping heads off passersby.

Then again, Wordle can be rather frustrating at times too. For all that it's a simple game, it can be fiendishly hard to guess the correct five-letter word in just six guesses. That's where we come in. Below you'll find a handy list of three hints that you can use to help find the solution. Scroll a little further, and we'll reveal today's Wordle answer in all its glory, along with an explanation of the word's meaning for those who need it.

Wordle July 28 hints

If you're having a bit of trouble figuring out the Wordle answer for today, then allow us to make life a little easier with our list of three handy hints:

• Today's Wordle word begins with a common consonant pair.
• The only vowel is "O".
• The word is something you can do with your feet.

Today's Wordle answer July 28

It's time to reveal the answer to today's Wordle. The word is...

STOMP.

If you're particularly angry about something, you might stomp with your feet instead of just walking. Alternatively, if one team is heavily beating another team at a game or sport, then you might say the losing team are getting stomped. It's a nice robust word, one which calls to mind the mental image of a chunky rhinoceros with a foul temper and earthquake-inducing hooves.

If you want to avoid turning all your friends and family members into foul-tempered stomping rhinos, you should probably keep the knowledge of today's Wordle answer to yourself until they've had the chance to play the game for themselves. It's never a nice thing to spoil other people's enjoyment of a game.

How to play Wordle

Wordle is a very straightforward word guessing game. The aim is to guess the correct five-letter word in just six guesses. With each guess, the individual letters of your chosen word will highlight green if they're in the correct place, or yellow if they're in the wrong place. If a letter doesn't appear in the solution word at all, it'll remain unhighlighted.

Using these clues you can start to narrow down the correct word by figuring out which letters are included in the word and in which positions they belong. Head over to the Wordle site to try it for yourself. Just remember: there's only one Wordle puzzle released per day, so if you want to play again, you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

How did Wordle begin?

Wordle began life as a little family game created by software engineer Josh Wardle. He created the game so that he and his partner could play a fun little word game together during the pandemic, and they quickly realised that there was something quite special in this simple little guessing game. So after a bit of refinement, Wardle released it to the public on his website, Power Language.

The game was released in October 2021, and by the end of the year the game had two million daily players. It became a viral hit, thanks in large part to the ease with which players could share their results in a spoiler-free manner on Twitter and other social media sites. In January 2022, Wardle accepted an offer form the New York Times to acquire Wordle for a seven-figure sum. Well done, Mr Wardle. Well done indeed.

Are any Wordle words not allowed?

You can type in pretty much any five-letter word in the English language and Wordle will accept it as a guess. However, the answer is picked each day from a much smaller list of more common five-letter words. There are still thousands of possible answers, of course, but it means the answer will never be a word as obscure as, say, "THIOL", or "CAIRD", or "MALIC" (yes, those are all real words).

There are very occasional words which the New York Times will choose not to publish as the day's Wordle answer, perhaps for reasons relating to recent news or politics. For example, shortly after news broke that Roe v Wade might be overturned in the United States, the NYT decided to change the March 30th word from "FETUS" to "SHINE", as the feeling was that the word "fetus" was too politically charged a word in the context of recent events.

The New York Times has also been careful never to allow what they consider to be rude words as the answer to a Wordle puzzle. But of course there's nothing stopping you from using even the dirtiest of words as guesses, as long as they're accepted words in the dictionary, and as long as you realise that they'll never end up being the answer.

Is Wordle getting too easy for you?

If Wordle is starting to get too easy, there are a few ways you can make the game more challenging for yourself. The first choice is to turn on Hard Mode. You can do this on the Wordle site by clicking the cog icon in the top-right of the screen. Hard Mode means that any highlighted letters must be used in all future guesses. This stops you from using the common tactic of choosing two words like "OUNCE" and "PAINS" to test all five vowels early on.

You can take it up another notch by playing by what we call "Ultra-Hard" rules. This means that every guess you enter must potentially be the answer. If you were just playing on Hard Mode, and you typed "MOIST", and the "O" appeared yellow, then nothing would stop you from making "POLAR" as your next word, even though it couldn't possibly be the answer because you already know the "O" is in the wrong place. If you play by "Ultra-Hard" rules, that's not allowed. You must adhere to every clue, and make sure every single word you enter is potentially the answer.

If after all that Wordle is still too easy for you, then you could always try one of the many other Wordle-inspired games online that have cropped up over the past year. One of our favourites is Worldle, in which you must guess a country of the world based on its shape. There's also Waffle, which is about swapping letters in a completed grid to complete all the words; Moviedle, which shows you an entire movie in a tiny space of time and challenges you to guess the movie within six guesses; and Quordle, which tasks you with solving four Wordles at once with the same guesses.

Looking ahead, perhaps you'd like to improve your chances of correctly guessing future Wordle words? If so, the best place to start is by reading through our best Wordle starting words for some great initial word ideas. When it comes to narrowing the word down, you can also make use of our up-to-date repository of past Wordle answers, so you can see if the word you're thinking of has already been used as an answer or not.

Use our Wordle Solver tool to help you figure out the answer to any Wordle in moments! Just pop your current guesses in the grid and watch the tool instantly give you all the potential answers.