The Hardest Wordle Words on Record: Can You Solve Them?

SPOILER NOTICE. This article names five past Wordle answers from May 2025 to July 2026. None of them is today's puzzle. If you want to play them cold first, take the Five Letter Word Puzzles test before you read past the first section, because the second half of this article is the answer key.

Everyone who plays Wordle has a word they still resent. Mine is PARER, which is not a word so much as a rumour, and which I have not forgiven since September 2022. But resentment is not data. I wanted to know which answers were genuinely the hardest, measured by the only thing that matters in this game: how many guesses people needed.

So we pulled every published solve average we could find, threw out the ones that were estimated rather than measured, and ranked what was left. Then we did the obvious thing and built a way for you to play the five worst offenders in a row, with the real average sitting next to your score.

First, take the test

Five-letter word puzzles, including Wordle, Quordle, Sedecordle and others, all follow the same or similar rules: guess a real word, and each letter comes back marked right place, wrong place or not in the word. Our Five Letter Word Puzzles test lets you find out how well you fare against the hardest words in the category. It gives you the five hardest answers on record, one at a time, easiest to hardest, six guesses each. The tiles colour in the way you expect, but in our own palette rather than Wordle's: blue for the right letter in the right place, coral for a letter that is in the word but somewhere else, slate for one that is out. Your progress saves in your browser, and at the end you get a plain-text scorecard with your average against the published one.

The number to beat is 5.68. That is the mean tester average across the five words. For comparison, the typical answer in the same data set comes in at 4.34, and the easiest one on record, LEAST, took 3.11.

Go play. The rest of this article will still be here.

Where the numbers come from, and what they are not

The averages come from the past-answers archive at wordle-hints-today.com, which publishes a "tester average" for every daily answer: the mean number of guesses its testing pool needed on the day. For puzzles since March 11, 2025, that figure is reported from actual play. For everything earlier, the site publishes an algorithmic estimate instead. We used only the reported rows, 502 puzzles from March 2025 through September 3, 2026, because an estimate of difficulty is exactly the thing we were trying to avoid.

Two honest caveats. First, these are not New York Times numbers. The Times' own solver, WordleBot, samples a far larger player base, and its averages do not always agree with a small tester pool. For PSHAW, the hardest word on our list, one syndicated report put WordleBot's average at 4.7 against the tester pool's 5.77. We chose the tester figures because they exist for every puzzle and were produced by one consistent method, which is what you need for a ranking. Treat the precise decimals as a consistent yardstick rather than a census. Second, a word that ran in 2023 and would have been a nightmare is not on this list, because we do not have a measured number for it. This is the hardest five on record, not of all time.

We checked every puzzle number and date against the game's own public answer feed, the same source we used for our look at CAPON and the editor's additions.

The five hardest, and why each one hurt

Everything below names the answers. You have been warned twice.

Show the five words (spoilers)

EAGERVALVEALOHAGOFERPSHAW

5. EAGER (5.57 average, puzzle #1,426, May 15, 2025)

EAGER looks harmless. It is a common word, both its vowels are the most common vowels in the answer list, and it ends in the very ordinary -ER. That ending is the trap. Once you have E and R placed at the end, the field of -AGER, -ATER, -AKER, -APER, -AVER, -AZER words is wide and full of words people think of before EAGER, and the repeated E means a lot of solvers spend a guess confirming a second E they had already been told about. A word can be easy to know and hard to reach.

4. VALVE (5.61 average, puzzle #1,866, July 29, 2026)

VALVE has one vowel doing all the work, two Vs, and no common opener that touches V at all. Most openers (CRANE, SLATE, STARE, TRACE) come back with the A and the E accounted for and nothing else. From there, the letters that remain to be found are V, L and V, and V is the letter people least want to commit a guess to, let alone twice. It ran four days after ALOHA, which made the last week of July 2026 one of the roughest stretches in the reported record; only a week in mid-May 2026, with DOWDY and WAVER back to back, averaged higher.

3. ALOHA (5.68 average, puzzle #1,862, July 25, 2026)

A borrowed word with the same letter at both ends and an H in the middle. Repeated letters punish solvers because the feedback for a doubled letter is easy to misread, and ALOHA's structure, A _ _ _ A, means a good opener often returns one A as "in the word, elsewhere" and no hint that there is a second. Many players then spend two guesses moving that single A around before the penny drops. It is also a loanword with no relatives in the answer list, so nobody's mental pattern library has a slot for it, and it was never on the original list at all: ALOHA is an editor's addition.

2. GOFER (5.75 average, puzzle #1,497, July 25, 2025)

Not GOPHER. GOFER, the person who goes for coffee, spelled the way the joke intends. Like ALOHA and PSHAW, it was not on the original 2,315-word answer list; it is an editor's addition, and it plays like one. The -ER ending funnels you into the same crowded neighbourhood as EAGER, the F is an unlikely letter to test early, and the correct spelling is one most people have to talk themselves into. Solvers who reached GO_ER on guess four still had GONER to burn before GOFER, and plenty tried GOPER first.

1. PSHAW (5.77 average, puzzle #1,852, July 15, 2026)

The worst word in the reported record is not a noun or a verb but a noise: the interjection you make at something beneath contempt. PSHAW has one vowel, opens with PS, a pairing almost absent from English outside Greek-derived medical vocabulary, and belongs to a part of speech, the scornful noise, that solvers stop considering after the first guess. A typical run reached _ _ H A W and stalled, because nothing familiar ends in -HAW and the brain does not offer PSHAW unprompted. It is the third editor's addition in the five. On the day, one solver site reported its busiest traffic in four years. If you beat 5.77 on it in the test, you did better than nearly everyone who played it live.

The runners-up

Seven words in the reported record averaged 5.5 or more. Only 31 of the 502 crossed 5.0 at all, so anything on this chart is in the top six per cent.

Three of the five hardest words were never on the original answer list, which says something about where the sharp edges in the modern game come from. Two more patterns run through the whole top forty. Repeated letters appear in 57 per cent of the hardest forty words against 35 per cent of the reported set as a whole; PIZZA, DOWDY, TIZZY, ALOHA, VALVE and EAGER all carry one. And words ending in Y are over-represented: fifteen of the top forty, because a final Y usually hides a rare consonant cluster in front of it (GUNKY, JUMPY, DOWDY) and gives a vowel-hunting opener nothing to hold on to.

What does not predict difficulty is how common the word is. EAGER and PIZZA are everyday words. PSHAW and GOFER are not. The game is not asking whether you know the word; it is asking whether you can reach it through a narrow gap in six moves, and common words with awkward shapes are as unreachable as rare ones. If you want to shore up the reaching part, our starting word calculator shows what share of the answer list any opener touches, and our guide to the best Wordle starting words covers why the SLATE and CRANE family keeps winning.

How did you do?

The honest benchmark is the one in the test: the five-word tester average is 5.68, and a word you fail scores seven. Beating it means averaging under 5.68 across all five, which leaves almost no room for a miss; solve four and drop one and you need the four to average 5.35 or better. If you post a scorecard, post the plain-text one the test gives you; it names no words, so it will not spoil the run for anyone else.

If you would like a daily puzzle that is hard in a different way, Pairdle asks you to decode a six-letter word two letters at a time, and its letter distribution hews closer to ordinary English than Wordle's curated list does.

By Jenna Nye, Logic Loft Games

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Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company; Quordle and Sedecordle belong to their respective owners. Logic Loft Games and the Five Letter Word Puzzles test are not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of them. The test uses the same publicly known guess-and-feedback rules so that results can be compared with published averages; its name, colours and layout are its own. Tester averages are from wordle-hints-today.com, retrieved September 4, 2026. Figures drawn by Logic Loft Games from that data. Puzzle numbers and dates verified against the game's public answer feed.