July was officially Wordle’s toughest ever, but it could get harder still – here’s why

If you struggled to solve many of the Wordle puzzles served up last month, then don’t be too hard on yourself: it was the toughest month in the game’s history.

I’ve crunched the numbers and, by my reckoning, it left every other month so far in the dust for difficulty, with an average score for the 31 games of 4.22.

That’s according to the daily figures reported by WordleBot, the game’s AI helper tool, which records the average among the many thousands of people who play. In turn, I’ve kept a list of those averages since the ‘Bot launched in April 2022, meaning I now have a spreadsheet ranking 1,221 games by difficulty.

The bad news is that rather than being merely a statistical anomaly, that tough run may point the way towards Wordle’s near future. My daily Wordle hints might well be even more useful from here on.

Wordle’s month from hell

Regular Wordlers will be in no doubt as to the game’s difficulty last month, with a string of near-impossible words causing all kinds of problems.

There was TIZZY, for instance, with its repeated letter Zs and average of 4.9, and POPPY with its triple Ps and 4.8 score.

FOIST might not look as difficult, but that was a classic example of Wordle’s letter-trap games, where the first letter can be changed to make several other words, in this case JOIST, HOIST, and MOIST; that one also came in at 4.8.

SAVVY, with its double Vs, also hit that score, while BALER at 4.7 was one of the nastiest ER games we’ve had recently. EXILE (4.6), NERVY (4.5), and FRILL also caused problems, and the fact that LORIS (4.2) can be considered easy in this company points towards the overall difficulty.

But the two worst last month were JUMPY and GOFER – with scores of 5.2 and 5.6, respectively.

Only 21 games in Wordle’s history have passed the 5.0 mark (with another nine at exactly that score), so to get two in the space of two weeks is the stuff of nightmares.

JUMPY’s problem was that J at the start; as my analysis of every Wordle answer shows, J is the least common letter in the game by far, so spotting it is rarely easy. The existence of LUMPY, DUMPY, and BUMPY will also have been a factor.

With GOFER, meanwhile, it was the combination of an ER ending (the most common in the game) and the not-so-common letters G and F that caused the issue. Its 5.6 score places it as the equal fourth hardest ever, behind only PARER, MUMMY, and CORER, and level with ROWER.

If you failed to solve any of them – or even all of them – then it’s entirely understandable; Wordle is a simple game, but it can be fiendishly tricky at times.

Tougher than the rest

WordleBot only launched in April 2022, a couple of hundred games into the series, so it’s possible that December 2021 or March 2022, or another month, was even more difficult. But I doubt it. I’ve played every Wordle so far and lost only once, and I certainly don’t recall anything like July 2025.

To confirm my hunch, I tallied the average score for each day to get the overall average for July, then repeated the process for each of the other 38 months for which I have full details.

One thing I found interesting was that July 2025 wasn’t just the most difficult so far – it was the most difficult so far by a long way.

The month’s overall average of 4.22 might not sound that much higher than that for October 2024, the next highest in the list at 4.15, but it’s statistically significant given that there’s only a 0.04 difference between months #2-7 in the list.

Plus, it’s a whopping 0.57 guesses harder than the easiest month, December 2023 – which came in at 3.65 – and way higher than the game’s overall average of 3.97.

Hard times are coming

One notable feature of July’s Wordles was that there were five ‘non-original’ answers among the 31 games.

When Josh Wardle created Wordle, he and his partner drew up a list of 2,315 words which would form the game’s answer list, then scheduled them to appear one a day for the next six or so years.

The New York Times removed a few of those when it bought Wordle in 2022, then left the list more or less unchanged for the next year. Then, in March 2023, it gave us GUANO – the first ‘extra’ solution added to the original pool and the start of a new era for Wordle.

More have followed since then, 17 in total, including such gems as UVULA, SNAFU, PRIMP, and MOMMY, all of which have been hard in their own right. But these words have been spaced apart, with most months seeing just one or none at all.

There have been exceptions, with June 2023, November 2024, and May 2025 all having two, and January 2025 having three. But to get five in a month, as we did in July, was unprecedented.

And all were difficult: ATRIA was a 4.1, NERVY a 4.5, LORIS was 4.2, TIZZY 4.9, and GOFER that immense 5.6. The average across those five games was a staggering 4.66; these were all genuine head-scratchers.

And the thing is, the NYT is going to have to keep adding more of these as time goes on. That’s because we’re now past 1,500 Wordles, meaning we have only around 800 original games left, with as yet no idea what will happen to the game when that list runs out.

The smart thing for the NYT to do is extend it for as long as possible, which means adding more words. And there lies the problem. Wardle’s list already covers many of the most obvious five-letter words in English, so we can expect the majority of the newly added words to be more difficult than the average.

So you can forget about classic Wordle start words such as STARE, CRANE, and SLATE being added – they’ve all already been and gone. So too ultra-common English words such as HOUSE, TODAY, and BELOW; they’ve all been past Wordle answers too. Instead, you can look forward to more like BALSA, KAZOO, BEAUT, SQUID, and TAUPE; uncommon words, slang words, words with uncommon letters…

August initially continued the July trend, with BANJO and DAUNT both coming in at 4.4, but the next few games were a little easier; maybe the NYT was giving us all a breather. But don’t be surprised if things get tougher again soon, because this game is only going one way from here. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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