Quickly find your footing on today's Wordle with our tips written for the October 21 (854) game, hone your general deductive skills, or bask in the warm glow of an easy win with the answer to today's puzzle. Whatever your Wordle of the Day goal, we're here to help.

What saved my game today was a good use of the gray letters I had previously stumbled upon, which allowed me to get to the answer. It wasn't immediate, but any victory is better than none. I felt I was smart enough to find the answer from the remaining letters, but next time I would like to see a little more green.

Today's answer is about a certain kind of smile, a smile that has an edge of self-satisfaction and smugness rather than warmth. Four of today's five letters are consonants.

No letter is used twice in today's puzzle.

If there is anything better than playing Wordle, it is playing Wordle well:

There is no pressure to complete it by midnight. So you can treat the game as a casual thing, like a newspaper crossword, and come back to it later if you come up blank.

You can't lose on a Saturday; the answer to the October 21 (854) Wordle is SMIRK.

The more past Wordle answers you cram into your memory bank, the more likely you are to be able to guess today's Wordle answer without accidentally choosing an already existing answer. Also, looking at past Wordle solutions can give you great ideas for fun starting words to keep your daily puzzles fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle solutions:

Wordle displays five boxes in six columns each day, and it is up to you to decide which five-letter word is hidden within each box.

You want to start with a strong word like ALERT, which contains multiple vowels, common consonants, and non-repeating letters; press Enter and the box will show you the correct or incorrect answer. If the box goes to ⬛️, that means the letter is not in the secret word at all. A ? means the letter is in the word but not in that position. ? means that the correct letter is in the correct position.

The second time, as a complement to the first, uses another "good" word to cover the common letter missed the last time and at the same time tries to avoid the letter that we now know for sure is not present in today's answer.

Then it is just a matter of using what you have learned to narrow down the correct word. You can try a total of 6 times, and you can only use actual words (so you cannot fill the box with EEEEE to see if there is an E). Letters can be repeated (e.g. BOOKS).

If you need further advice, see Wordle's tips. Also, if you want to know which words are already in use, scroll to the relevant section above.

Wordle was originally conceived by software engineer Josh Wardle as a surprise for his partner, who liked word games. From there it spread to his family and was finally released to the public. Since then, the word puzzle game has spawned a slew of Wordle-like games, focusing the daily gimmicks on music, math, and geography; it wasn't long before Wordle became so popular that it was sold to the New York Times for a seven-figure sum. Indeed, it would only be a matter of time before we would be communicating solely through tricolored boxes.