Today’s Wordle is the 5th toughest ever, ending streaks for 50% of players

It’s a grim day in Wordle Nation: almost exactly 50% of Wordle players saw their coveted Wordle streaks come to an end. That’s because today’s word (puzzle 1426) is the fifth toughest in Wordle history. Out of nearly two million games sampled, only 49.8% of players got today’s word right, according to Engaging Data and Wordlebot.

Don’t worry, I won’t spoil the puzzle in this story: for that you can visit our daily Wordle solution page.

I can vouch for the toughness of today’s word. Several of us here at PC Gamer tried the puzzle and shared our results, and it took all of us every one of our six guesses to solve the puzzle. (Except for Kara, who got it on her first guess, which may or may not be related to the fact that she schedules all of PC Gamer’s Wordle solution posts.)

Today’s word wasn’t even an unusual one, and most of us guessed a few of the letters early because they’re common ones. But it is a tricky puzzle, and deceptive because when you get a few yellow or even green in your first two rows, you figure: No problem, I got this. We all barely got it.

There are a few ways Wordle can trip up players. Sometimes it’s with a word like BUNCH, where players might get every letter but the first and then burn through guesses like LUNCH, MUNCH, and PUNCH until they’re all out. Having most of the puzzle but repeatedly missing one letter has ended many a streak.

Other tricky words are those that contain the same letter more than twice, like MUMMY or JAZZY, which are a breeze if you picked the letter early but can stymie players if they don’t ever guess that particular consonant. Sometimes even words that use a letter twice, like COYLY, can stump players even if they do get them, because the word is a bit unusual.

And then there’s the infamous PARER from puzzle 454, which broke 60% of player streaks—because who the hell ever uses the word PARER? Even if I had a parer, I wouldn’t call it a parer, I’d call it, like, the knifey-thingie. “Hey honey, do you know where the knifey-thingie is? You know, the thing we use to cut the things?”

I assume if you’ve read this far you’ve already played today’s Wordle, so my condolences if you broke your streak. And if you got it right (or cheated), congrats: you live to Wordle another day.