The Hardest Wordle Words Ever, Measured — and the Easiest

GUPPY is the hardest Wordle answer on record by this site's measure, and RAISE is the easiest. Both claims are narrower than they sound, and the narrowness is the point. "Hard" on this page never means "players found it hard" — the site has no honest way to know that for most dates. It means the answer put measurable pressure on a consistent solver: the reference openers CRANE, SLATE and ADIEU left it hidden in a large group of candidates, it sat inside a trap family of near-identical neighbors, it repeated a letter, or the solver-recommended line simply needed many turns to corner it. Each of those pressures can be recomputed by anyone from the answer archive and the site's word lists, which is why this ranking can update itself as new puzzles complete instead of freezing into a listicle.

The four pressures combine into a single score, and the score is expressed as a percentile within the archive: 100 marks the very top of the recorded distribution, 90 the start of the hardest tenth, and 0 the very bottom, with exact ties sharing one value. A percentile is the right shape for this claim because the raw score has no natural units — what matters is where an answer stands among the 1,855 distinct words that have actually appeared. It is the same measurement that powers the difficulty explorer, so the number you see beside a word here matches the number on its archive page.

The distribution says most Wordle days are ordinary. Of the 1,855 distinct answers recorded from 19 June 2021 to 7 August 2026, 197 sit in the top band the explorer labels "Hard for the solver" (percentile 90 or above), 463 land in the "Tricky" band from 65 to 89, 559 fall in the middle of the pack, and 636 were easier than that. So roughly one answer in ten carries real mechanical difficulty, and the extremes below are exactly what they claim to be: the thin tails of a mostly mild distribution. If yesterday felt brutal, the honest first question is whether it appears in the table below — often the answer is that it does not, and the difficulty was in the guessing, not the word.

Reading the "why" column is more useful than memorizing the words. The same few mechanisms produce almost every hard day: a doubled letter that hides one of its copies from a single yellow, a trap family like _ATCH or _OUND where each surviving neighbor costs a full turn, and a feedback bucket so large that the second guess starts nearly blind. The easiest answers invert the same mechanisms — a scarce letter that acts like a fingerprint, five distinct letters, a tiny bucket. None of this predicts what tomorrow's answer will be; it explains, mechanically, why some answers resist good play and others fold on turn three.

How we tested this

Difficulty is a percentile computed within the 1,876 completed puzzles (1,855 distinct words) recorded from 19 June 2021 to 7 August 2026. The raw score combines the average candidates left by CRANE, SLATE and ADIEU when this word is the answer, the length of the example solver-recommended line, the size of the word's largest one-letter-different family, and repeated letters. It describes pressure on a consistent solver, not player averages. Where a newly added answer has no solver route yet, turns shows — and a neutral three-turn value enters the score. The information-theoretic scoring behind the solver is explained on the math page.

The 25 hardest answers on record

Every row links to the dated puzzle page, and the final column names the mechanism — derived from that word's own measurements, not written by hand for effect. Ties in the percentile are broken by solver turns, then bucket size, then trap-family size.

Two patterns dominate this table. Doubled letters appear far more often than they do in the archive at large, because a doubled letter breaks the simplest mental model of feedback: one yellow reads as one copy. And trap families cluster at the top because they defeat information gathering itself — once the shared frame is green, each guess can eliminate only one neighbor, and no cleverness inside the family changes that arithmetic. The practical counter is the one the trap-families guide measures: spend a turn on a separating word that tests several remaining letters at once instead of guessing candidates in sequence.

The 15 easiest answers on record

The bottom of the distribution is just as mechanical. These answers gave the solver almost nothing to do, and the reasons are visible in their letters.

Notice that "easy" rarely means "common word". It means distinctive feedback: a scarce letter that only a handful of archived answers contain, or a combination of common letters so distinctive that CRANE, SLATE and ADIEU leave a bucket small enough to read like a name tag. An unusual word can be an easy answer and a familiar word a hard one — the measure follows the feedback structure, not the vocabulary.

What to change in your own play

Three habits follow directly from the mechanisms in these tables. First, when your feedback fits a family — four letters placed, one slot open — stop guessing candidates and play a separating word; the hardest table is largely a list of days when that discipline paid. Second, keep doubled letters alive as candidates: a single yellow E does not rule out a second E, and the doubled-letter rows above are the cost of assuming it does. Third, treat a scarce letter's yellow as the strongest clue on the board and re-rank your candidates around it before spending another guess. None of these change the distribution — most days remain ordinary — but they specifically target the tail where games are lost.

This page recomputes from the completed archive, so the tables extend themselves as new answers finish worldwide. For any single date, the difficulty explorer shows the same percentile in a searchable form, and each linked puzzle page carries the full breakdown for that day.