After four years of hanging out in the New York Times Games app, Wordle remains incredibly popular for millions who try to guess the newest five-letter word every morning. One of the appeals of Wordle is the challenge, and seeing how your score compares with everyone else who played that day.
The New York Times' Wordlebot analyzes everyone's scores and the average number of guesses it takes to solve each day's puzzle. According to Wordlebot, these were the 10 most difficult Wordles of 2025.
Wordle #1493 - July 21
NYT average: 5.4
Solve rate: 83%
This day's answer was TIZZY, which likely took a while to save because of the double letters and the rarely used letter Z. Double-letter words tend to be quite tricky. Couple that with Z and you've got a dousy.
Tizzy did tie for the 10th spot with two other words: #1475 from July 3, which was Poppy, a rare triple letter word, and #1388 from April 7; Hazel featuring the rare letter Z.
Wordle #1385 - April 4
NYT average: 5.2
Solve rate: 81%
Nearly twenty percent of all Wordle players failed find the word Krill. That included several Tom's Guide staffers. This was one of the hard words we highlighted last year.
Getting the backend '_RILL' is the easy part, but there are so many words like grill, drill and frill that could have worked.
"There were so many to choose from! Brill? No. Grill? No. Frill? You get the picture. So yes, I lost my Wordle streak because of a crustacean. That'll teach me to stick to my strategy," my colleague Millie on the Tom's Guide Homes team said.
Wordle #1370 - March 20
NYT Average: 5.1
Solve rate: 80%
Like #9, the difficulty of #1370 comes down to how many words have the backend '_ASTE'. As you can see from our guess above, that includes WASTE, HASTE, and PASTE, just to name a few examples.
Rhyming words like this are always tricky.
Wordle #1300 - January 9
NYT Average: 5.3
Solve rate: 80%
This answer (WAFER) was difficult to solve because if you found -ER ending or the WA- start, there were so many ways you could go about it. If you just found the vowels, it could take even longer. You could have Water, Wager or Waver before you even got to Wafer.
Wordle #1500 - July 28
NYT Average: 5.3
Solve rate: 79%
This puzzle literally broke our personal solve streak, largely because of the rarely used letter V, and it's a double! As with some of the other tricky Wordles, the repeated letter is what makes it hard. Plus, according to Merriam Webster there are only 11 other words that even feature two Vs like this, and savvy may be the most familiar.
Wordle #1482 - July 10
NYT Average: 5.6
Solve rate: 78%
This answer (JUMPY) is tricky because most of the time, you're avoiding plurals or -y words as you solve. Additionally, like some of the previous tricky words, jumpy has a lot of rhymes that it could be. J is surprisingly rare as well with only 48 'common' words featuring the letter, though the dictionary shows over 300.
Wordle #1576 - October 12
NYT Average: 5.3
Solve rate: 75%
WOUND proved a tricky one as "_OUND" presents a number of alternatives; Bound, Round, Sound and Found were likely guessed by solvers. A quarter of Wordlers didn't even solve this puzzle.
Wordle #1497 - July 25
NYT Average: 5.6
Solve rate: 64%
As we enter the top 3, I wanted to note that July proved to be the hardest month, taking three spots in our top 10, plus two more that tied for the 10th spot.
As for this day's puzzle, what a streak breaker, knocking nearly 40% of solvers out. We were one group that never even came close to G or F in our solve above. If you got stuck with the vowels and ER, there are far too many ways you could go to find the next word.
Wordle #1310 - January 19
NYT Average: 5.7
Solve rate: 64%
The second-hardest Wordle of 2025, ROWER, does feature double letters but also, depending on what letters you gathered first, far too many rhymes or other words that could fill the spot. In our solve, we had robed, roles, and ropey before we got close to rower, largely thanks to nabbing RO and E in our first guess. Still, such an open-ended set of letters broke 36% of all players.
Wordle #1426 - May 15
NYT Average: 6.0
Solve rate: 49%
This puzzle's word, EAGER, is by far the hardest Wordle of the last few years. The hardest word in 2024, CORER, was still solved by over 50% of people. Eager knocked out 51% of the people who played across a sample of 1,780,000 games.
Like Corer, Eager hits you with a two letter Es. Additionally, as you can see in our guesses, which we lost, the position of A and ER could be so many different words. We've seen that combination of letters in other difficult puzzles like Wafer, the seventh hardest puzzle this year.
Even solving for one of the consonants doesn't get you all the way there. "_AGER" could be lager, wager, or pager, for example.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
