The hardest Wordle answers of all time — every puzzle analysed

By Omer Liban · Published August 13, 2026 · Data through Wordle #1,881 (August 13, 2026) · Methodology

A deterministic solver played every Wordle ever published — 1,882 puzzles across five-plus years — under the same rules a careful human follows. The results settle some long-running arguments: which answers are genuinely the hardest, which opener is measurably best against the real answer list, whether the New York Times made the game harder, and how far the answer dictionary has drifted from classic word lists.

The 15 hardest Wordle answers ever

Ranked by the number of guesses a perfect-play solver needed (ties broken by how many dictionary words were still possible after the opening guess — more survivors means a harder puzzle). Six guesses is the human limit; fifteen answers in Wordle history sit above it, and five of those needed eight guesses or more.

The pattern is unmistakable: 8 of the 15 hardest answers end in -ER. Words like JOKER, HOVER and BAKER share their last four letters with a crowd of rivals (POKER, MOVER, MAKER…), so each guess eliminates almost nothing — the solver is reduced to trying them one by one. The same trap powers HOUND, the second-hardest answer ever: after the opener, 430 candidate words remained, and BOUND, FOUND, MOUND, POUND, ROUND, SOUND and WOUND all had to be burned through. BATCH and PATCH ran the identical gauntlet against CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH and WATCH.

The easiest answers ever

At the other end, 59 answers fell in two guesses. For a handful of them the opener's feedback left exactly one word standing: WROTE (#159), BRAVO (#1,079), STARE (#1,290) and OVATE (#1,829) were all solved the moment ORATE came back. Across all 1,882 puzzles, 3.1% of answers could be reached by guess two; the most common outcome is four guesses.

How hard is a typical Wordle?

The average across all of Wordle history is 3.76 guesses. The 15 gold-bar puzzles — 0.8% of all Wordles — are the ones no strategy reliably beats: even guessing the mathematically best word every time runs past six.

Is Wordle getting harder?

Slightly, yes — but not when most people think it did. Difficulty bottomed out in 2023 at 3.7 average guesses and has climbed since: 2025 and 2026 are the two hardest years on record at 3.82. The rise is real but small — about 3% harder than the 2023 low.

Does the day of the week matter?

Unlike the crossword, Wordle has no published difficulty schedule — and the data shows no sign of a hidden one. The spread between the hardest weekday (Wednesday, 3.86) and the easiest (Monday, 3.72) is marginal. Saturday — the crossword's hardest day — is one of Wordle's easiest.

The best opening words, measured against every answer ever

Most "best opener" lists are computed against a dictionary. This one is computed against the 1,882 answers actually used: for each candidate opener, how many possible words survive its feedback on an average day?

ORATE edges out IRATE and RAISE. All the leaders share the same skeleton — a heavy load of E, A, R, O, T — which matches the letter table below. The popular CRATE and TRACE are fine choices, a couple of words behind.

Letter patterns across 1,882 answers

• Every letter of the alphabet has now appeared in at least one answer — including J, Q, X and Z.
• S starts more answers than any other letter (281 puzzles) — yet almost never ends one: only 28 answers (1.5%) end in S, the fingerprint of Wordle's famous no-plurals policy.
• E is the most common final letter (375 answers), followed by Y (261).
• 31.08% of answers contain a repeated letter — the single most underestimated pattern in the game.

Wordle now repeats itself

For years every answer was unique. No longer: 21 words have now appeared twice. The first-ever repeat was poetic — CIGAR, the very first Wordle answer (#0, June 2021), returned as puzzle #1,689. The quickest return so far is SANDY: just 524 puzzles between appearances.

Any word can come back. The full answer archive has a checker that looks any word up across every puzzle so far.

The dictionary has modernised

Measured against the classic Stanford GraphBase word list — the public-domain standard built from traditional English usage — 17 Wordle answers don't appear at all: ADMIN, BICEP, BLEEP, CYBER, DETOX, EMOJI, FRITZ, INBOX, LATTE, LORIS, MANGA, MIDGE, MINTY, PENNE, POUTY, RAMEN, TROPE. EMOJI, RAMEN, LATTE and DETOX would have been unplayable in a 1990s word game; Wordle's answer list quietly tracks the language as it moves.

Among words the classic list does contain, the rarest answers ever used (by corpus frequency rank) are RUMBA (#1,335), NERDY (#1,125) and PRIMO (#361) — obscure on paper, yet none of them cracked the hardest-answers table. Rare words aren't what makes Wordle hard; common words with crowded neighbourhoods are.

Methodology

Data. Every Wordle answer from #0 (CIGAR, June 19, 2021) through #1,881 (CRASH, August 13, 2026) — 1,882 puzzles, 1,861 unique words — from this site's answer archive, cross-checked against two independent public records. The full dataset is downloadable as JSON and CSV.

Difficulty model. A deterministic solver plays each puzzle under standard rules. Guess one is always ORATE (the measured best opener). Every later guess must be consistent with all previous feedback — the way a careful human plays — and the solver picks the candidate that minimises the expected number of words remaining, breaking ties toward the more common word. Guesses come from the 5,757-word Stanford GraphBase five-letter list (public domain, frequency-ordered), plus the 17 modern answers it lacks. "Hardest" means the solver needed the most guesses; the count of candidates alive after the opener breaks ties.

Limitations. Solver difficulty is not identical to human difficulty — it has a perfect vocabulary and no hunches — but it is consistent across all 1,882 puzzles, which is what a fair ranking requires. A different opener shifts individual guess counts slightly; the rankings and year-over-year comparisons are stable. Obscurity ranks reflect written-English frequency in the GraphBase list, not how familiar a word feels today.

Use these findings

More Wordle

• Today's Wordle hints →
• Every past answer
• Wordle Solver
• Best starting words & strategy