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Is Wordle getting harder, or does it just feel that way?

The complaint comes round every few months. Some of it is real, some of it is how the game feels once you have played four hundred of them.

3 min read

"Is it getting harder?" is the most reliable complaint in daily word games. It comes round every few months, usually after a run of two or three awkward answers, and the interesting part is that it is partly true and mostly about something else.

The part that is real

A daily puzzle with a human curator will drift. Once a few hundred everyday words have been used, the obvious ones are gone — you cannot run CRANE twice — and what is left skews towards words that are slightly less common by definition. That is arithmetic, not malice, and it happens to every daily puzzle that does not repeat itself.

Editorial taste drifts too. A curator who has watched people solve four hundred puzzles has a different sense of "fair" from one who has watched forty.

The parts that only feel real

Streaks change the stakes. A word that would have been a shrug on day three is agonising on day three hundred, because there is something to lose. Nothing about the word changed.

You remember the bad ones. Nobody posts about the day the answer was TRAIN. A run of two hard words in a week reads as a trend; a run of two easy ones reads as nothing.

You got better, so the easy ones stopped counting. As you improve, the puzzles you solve in three stop registering as puzzles at all. What is left in memory is the ones that took five or six, which is the same slice of the distribution it always was.

What makes a word actually hard

Difficulty is not obscurity. The words that ruin people are usually common ones with an awkward shape:

  • Repeated letters. LEVEL, ERROR, SPEED. Guess one letter twice and the board only marks it as many times as the answer holds — which reads as a contradiction until you know the rule.
  • Shared endings. _IGHT gives you EIGHT, FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT. Four letters placed and six words left is the worst position on the board.
  • One rare letter in an ordinary word. JOKER and WALTZ are everyday words that almost nobody opens with.

What we do about it here

Every answer carries a difficulty grade, derived from how common the word actually is in ordinary writing rather than from anybody's instinct. The calendar draws from a shuffled bag rather than sorting, so a week holds a mix instead of a fortnight of easy ones followed by a wall — and the grade is shown on the board before you start, so a hard day is a hard day you were told about.

If you want the hard ones deliberately, unlimited goes up to eleven letters. If you want the opposite, the shorter lengths are genuinely gentler.

More free word games and tools

Wordle Unlimited Play wordle unlimited free, as many rounds as you like, at four to eleven letters. The practice mode the daily game never gave you, with no one-a-day limit and nothing to sign up to. Wordle Archive Every past wordle puzzle, still playable and still free. Catch up on the ones you missed, or play old wordle puzzles from the very beginning, with no account and no subscription. Mini Crossword A free online crossword in five by five, with real clues written from a dictionary rather than trivia. An easy crossword you can finish in a couple of minutes, new every day. Word Search Word search online at four difficulties, on a grid generated fresh every time so you never meet the same puzzle twice. There are printable word search sheets too if you would rather use a pen. Spelling Bee The spelling bee game with your spelling, not ours: seven letters, one in the middle, and every word you can build from them. A daily spelling bee puzzle plus every hive we have set before it. Boggle Play boggle free on a four by four tray: trace every word you can find through touching letters before the clock runs out. A word grid game that scores longer finds higher. Text Twist Text twist online and free: six letters, and every word they can make, against the clock. A word scramble game where finding the six-letter word opens the next round. Word Ladder A word ladder puzzle: change one letter at a time to get from the first word to the last, and every rung has to be a real word. Solve it in as few steps as you can. Cryptogram Cryptogram puzzles in a letter substitution cipher, in the cryptoquote style. Crack a single letter and it fills in everywhere at once, until the whole quote reads. Hangman The hangman game online, at three to eleven letters. Free hangman with a word list long enough that it will not repeat on you, and the one game everybody already knows how to play. Sight Word Games Sight word bingo on a four by four card: a word is called and your child finds it. Built on the Dolch sight words schools have set since 1936, for the words that cannot be sounded out. Phonics Games Phonics games for children learning to read: sound out CVC words one letter at a time, with the missing sound to find. Phonics practice for kids that speaks the word aloud. Wordle for Kids Wordle for kids, age-banded for five to thirteen at three to five letters. Word games for kids that stay inside vocabulary a child that age actually meets, with no ads during play. Wordle Solver A free wordle solver and wordle helper: enter the letters you have found and where they sit, and see every word still possible. No account, and it never shows you the answer unasked. Word Unscrambler Unscramble words instantly: type your letters and get every word they make, longest first. A letter unscrambler that works on anything from three letters to a full rack. Anagram Solver An anagram solver that uses every letter you give it, not just some of them. Rearrange a word or a name into the real words hiding inside it. Word Finder Find words with letters you already hold, and say where they sit. A word finder tool for a board you are part way through rather than a blank rack. Scrabble Word Finder Every playable word from your Scrabble rack, scored on official tile values and sorted highest first. A scrabble helper for the word you cannot quite see. Words With Friends Finder Your rack scored on Words With Friends tile values, which are not the Scrabble ones, against the dictionary that game actually accepts. A words with friends cheat that knows the difference. Crossword Solver A crossword clue solver for a half-filled grid: give it the letters you have and a question mark for the rest, and see every answer that fits.