Five Letter Word Puzzles

How the test works

You get five words, one at a time, in ascending order of difficulty. Each is a real answer from the daily game's history, so each has a real number attached: the average guesses a tester pool needed on the day it ran. The easiest word in the set averaged 5.57; the last one averaged 5.77. For context, the typical daily answer in the same data set comes in at 4.34, and the easiest, LEAST, at 3.11. Your score for a word is the guess you solve it on. A word you cannot solve in six scores seven, which is the usual convention for a miss and keeps a failed round from being free.

After each guess every tile is coloured. Blue means the letter is Locked: right letter, right place. Coral means it is Loose: in the word, but not there. Slate means it is Out. If you play Wordle, Quordle or Sedecordle, the meaning is the one you already know; only the colours differ. Repeated letters follow the standard rule: the word only gives you as many marks for a letter as it actually contains, with exact placements claimed first. The on-screen keyboard remembers what you have learned about each letter, and a physical keyboard works too.

Where the averages come from

The five words and their averages come from the published past-answers archive at wordle-hints-today.com, retrieved 2026-09-04. That site reports a tester-pool average for every daily answer since March 2025 and estimates one for older puzzles; we used only the reported rows, which is why the five run from May 2025 to July 2026 rather than across the game's whole history. They are not New York Times or WordleBot figures, and the two sources do not always agree: WordleBot, which samples a much larger player base, has been reported at a lower average for at least one of these words. We picked the tester-pool numbers because they cover every puzzle with one consistent method. Puzzle numbers and dates were checked against the game's own public answer feed.

The full story of why these particular five words punish solvers, with a table of the runners-up, is in the article this test was built for: The Hardest Wordle Words on Record, and a Test to See How You Do. Play first. The article names the words.

If you liked this

Rate your usual opener against the full answer list with the starting word calculator, or read where the game's rarest answers really come from in our look at CAPON and the editor's additions. We also build a daily word game of our own: Pairdle asks you to decode a six-letter word two letters at a time. More guides live in our guides hub.

Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company; Quordle and Sedecordle belong to their respective owners. This test is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of them. It uses the same publicly known guess-and-feedback rules so that your result can be compared with the published averages; the name, colours and layout are our own. All play happens in your browser and nothing is sent to a server. Last updated 2026-09-04.