Today’s Wordle answer is evading nearly 30 percent of players, The New York Times—which has been publishing Josh Wardle’s beloved word puzzle since buying it in 2022—said on Twitter.
The guessing game, a more streamlined, bloodless hangman, requires a bit of luck to solve, so it’s reasonable that some players will fail to find an answer within six possible turns. Some words use uncommon X’s and Z’s, others are crammed with double letters players don’t want to risk a guess on, and so players will lose and cede their unusual Wordle answers to the fickle English language gods. But today’s Wordle answer seems so…normal for such a challenge.
The five-letter word begins with one of the least common English letters, though its following four letters are perfectly ordinary. It’s a word you see often, too, as part of movie titles, or video game character names, used as an insult, or during a magic trick. Nevertheless, even as an avid Wordle player, I wasn’t able to solve it.
I want to believe I was psyched out by the messaging around it. I know, I know, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but I feel like immediately attempting to do something after learning 30 percent of people failed to do it—which I did—is sipping from a poisoned well. My regrettable performance indicates as much.
According to WordleBot, the Times’ Wordle analysis tool, my puzzle-solving “skill” level was a sad 60 out of 99, about 30 points lower than my typical score; although, it was on par with today’s NYT average skill score, which was 63. WordleBot also indicated that it took the average Wordle player 5.4 turns to solve today’s game, and, in the section where WordleBot demonstrates how it would have chosen to complete the puzzle, even the robot needed six tries.
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The US is ranked #18 in the world for Wordle, with a national average of 3.92. The American state with the best Wordle average is North Dakota (3.65). The US city with the best Wordle scores is Saint Paul, Minnesota, with an average of 3.51. Probability of guessing correctly in two tries is 6.4785%.
Because very few people fail at a given Wordle (typically around 3%), I use the percent of people who use all six guesses, whether they win (6/6) or fail (X/6) as a proxy for a word's difficulty. This percentage varies quite a bit, suggesting that some answers are definitely harder than others.
3. More people solve Wordle on their first guess than can be explained by chance. In the list above, we excluded first guesses that were that day's Wordle solution. That's because, about one game in every 250, a reader gets the answer right on the first try.
Wordle's age breakdown is pretty unique: Young people (under 35) are the most likely to play, but many of them didn't like the game. Meanwhile, middle-aged adults (35-54) were the most likely to intend to play Wordle, while very few older Americans (55+) said they didn't like the game once they tried it.
But statistics show that, on average, 0.2 to 0.5 per cent of people guess right on the first try – between five and 12 times more than chance would suggest. Put another way: Of the roughly 2 million daily Wordle players, about 860 people should be guessing the right word on their first try.
For Normal mode, SLATE, SALET, ROATE and STARE are known to be some of the best alternative starting words for Wordle. For Hard mode, DEALT is believed to be the best Wordle starting word. However, COALS and NITER were found to be the best performing word pair combination for the opening two guesses.
popularity (during quarter) have shown continual declines since this period. Max. popularity (during quarter) is at approximately a third of the popularity seen during Q1 2022.
While breaking a long streak can be disheartening and frustrating — the current longest streak is 968 days, held by multiple people in Hoquiam, Washington and Willowbrook, Illinois — it's an inevitability. This is part of the game, too, said Mason. “It wakes you up.”
Almost one in two players fail to solve this word as it has a 48% failure rate. Furthermore, it broke 60% of World streaks on the day of its release. There are 10 possible answers which use the “P_ _ ER” letter combination.
The least common letters in all words are the usual suspects: J, Q, Z, X, and it's unlikely any five-letter Wordle word would contain any of those characters. F, V, and K are also uncommon, but these letters have higher odds of being in one of the five possible Wordle positions.
Unsurprisingly, Z, Q, J, and X consistently round out the bottom. As for the letters that begin the most English words, the top five are T, O, A, W, and B. For the end letter, the most common are E, S, T, D, and N.
There are some other telltale signs, too, such as unlikely words suddenly spiking in popularity on the days where they also happened to be the answer. “What serious Wordle player would choose NANNY as a first guess? You'd be testing only 2 vowels and 1 consonant!” Dilger observes.
Even over the course of a year, a 97% win rate will see about 3 5-11 losses, compared to 7-13 losses for a 98% win rate. That means it's very possible for a “better” word to fail more often than a “worse” one, even over a significant period of time.
While breaking a long streak can be disheartening and frustrating — the current longest streak is 968 days, held by multiple people in Hoquiam, Washington and Willowbrook, Illinois — it's an inevitability. This is part of the game, too, said Mason. “It wakes you up.”
Almost one in two players fail to solve this word as it has a 48% failure rate. Furthermore, it broke 60% of World streaks on the day of its release. There are 10 possible answers which use the “P_ _ ER” letter combination.
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Introduction: My name is Msgr. Benton Quitzon, I am a comfortable, charming, thankful, happy, adventurous, handsome, precious person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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