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Here Are the 10 Most Difficult Wordle Words of 2022

These words broke many a streak...

Mark Serrels Editorial Director
Mark Serrels is an award-winning Senior Editorial Director focused on all things culture. He covers TV, movies, anime, video games and whatever weird things are happening on the internet. He especially likes to write about the hardships of being a parent in the age of memes, Minecraft and Fortnite. Definitely don't follow him on Twitter.
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Mark Serrels
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Wordle puzzle game on an iPhone

What were the toughest Wordle words of 2022?

 James Martin/CNET

Earlier in 2022, when Wordle was at the peak of its popularity, folks would go nuts if that day's Wordle was weird or difficult. But what was the toughest Wordle of 2022?

This's precisely what gaming site I'm a Puzzle attempted to figure out, trawling through data stored in a Twitter API called WordleStats. How does it work? Well, remember when absolutely everyone was posting their Wordle attempts on Twitter? WordleStats has been collecting that data, and calculating difficulty based on the relative success and failure of each puzzle. 

So what were the hardest words? According to the numbers they are...

1. PARER
2. FOYER
3. CATCH
4. WATCH
5. MUMMY
6. CATER
7. COYLY
8. TRITE
9. FOUND
10. TACIT

Some of this checks out. A number of them -- like FOYER or TACIT -- feel like words I'd spell incorrectly. Others like PARER barely feel like words that actually exist. All of them, outside maybe CATER or FOUND, feel like words that might be difficult to solve using traditional Wordle techniques like loading up on vowels early, for example.

But we absolutely have to take this study with the proverbial grain of salt, especially given that it was based on people posting on Twitter. It's possible more people failed on less obvious words that we didn't post on Twitter or that people were more likely to post successes if the word was deemed difficult.

It'll be interesting to see how Wordle plays out in the future. Months after buying the game from creator Josh Wardle, The New York Times has finally assigned a full-time editor to manage the Wordle process, which means new words will be manually chosen, as opposed to being selected at random. 

For more Wordle tips and tricks, here's a roundup of excellent strategies. Plus, New York Times Games has released a new way to play Wordle. If you're done with Wordle for the day, try these other addictive puzzle games.