A new year brings new games to the New York Times world, and despite focusing on the new, it’s hard not to think about the old. 2025 saw some pretty fun Wordle’s this year, and some that made us groan when we realized our mistake.
The website, engaging-data, collects all the information from Wordle games and lets you look at it on a day-to-day basis. With this data, we can see which Wordle puzzles caused the most drama in the past year.
Wordle #1426 - ‘Eager’
A simple look at the guess distribution shows that this was one, if not the, hardest Wordle puzzle of 2025. Over half of all players, 51%, were not able to guess this word. On May 15th, the New York Times was able to knock out half of their user base's Wordle streak, with a word that’s not even that hard. Sometimes, though, a not-so-hard word is what makes it that much more difficult.
Wordle #1310 - ‘Rower’
The January 19th word, Rower, was the second-hardest Wordle to solve last year. It had an average win of 64% when pitted against the Wordlebot sample, and took an average of 5.7 guesses to solve.
Again, not a hard word, but perhaps not a commonly-used word. Plus, any word with an ‘er’ ending is bound to create a few problems. It could be just about anything.
Wordle #1497 - ‘Gofer’
This July 25th word ruined the streaks of almost 40% of Wordle players, and took an average of 5.6 turns to solve. This one is a little more understandable, we think. And if you think this is just a weird spelling of the familiar mammal, you'd be incorrect. A 'gofer,' is an individual who runs errands, while a 'gopher' is the friendly rodent.
Again, this word has the ‘er’ issue, and with a less frequent “f” showing up, it’s no surprise that this word caused problems among players.
Wordle #1576 - ‘Wound’
This October 12th perhaps more annoying than difficult, a word ending in "—ound" is bound to leave a good portion of the play group unlucky.
In this instance, it was around 25%, with over half of players not solving the puzzle until their 5th or 6th turn.
If you guessed ‘bound,’ ‘round,’ ‘found,’ or ‘sound,’ before even looking at the top-left of your keyboard, you were surely not alone.
Wordle #1482 - ‘Jumpy’
This is the only Wordle puzzle in the top five that had a higher solving percentage than the alternative. This puzzle, which dropped on July 10th, had a 78% win, with over 20% of the player sample losing their streak.
This word, like ‘Wound,’ is also a common rhyme. And if you don’t naturally drift toward the letter J, it’s unsurprising that you would’ve missed this puzzle.
Other problematic Wordle words this year also included:
- Savvy, which had a 79% solve rate
- Wafer, which had an 80% solve rate
- Baste, which had an 80% solve rate
- Krill, which had an 81% solve rate
- Tizzy, which had an 83% solve rate
