The 10 Toughest Wordle Puzzles of 2025—And the States That Struggled Most

For the uninitiated, the deceptively simple daily word game Wordle gives players six chances to correctly guess a mystery five-letter word. Every time the player takes a guess, the game shows which letters, if any, are in the right place (highlighted in green), which letters are in the answer but not yet in the right place (highlighted in yellow), and which letters are not in the answer at all (in gray).

Regular players—of which there are now over 10 million, with a staggering 4.8 billion puzzles are now being solved each year—are rewarded with a winning streak, which builds up day after day with each correct solve. 

But as any regular Wordle player will tell you, not every game is as easy as the others. Wordle’s setup naturally makes unfamiliar words, words with repeated letters, and words featuring uncommon letters, like Zs and Qs, far more difficult to solve than others—and now, a fascinating new study by language-learning platform Preply has sought to uncover precisely which of this year’s words players found the hardest. 

The Most Difficult Wordle Words of 2025

The Preply study’s authors analyzed Google search data for the term “Wordle hint” across every Wordle puzzle from January to November. This data was then ranked by the number of times players searched for hints, and broken down geographically to identify which answers produced the largest relative spikes both nationally and state by state, and to determine precisely where players are most likely to resort to Googling Wordle-solving assistance. 

With all those numbers crunched, the Preply study showed that the toughest World word in 2025 was INBOX, which was the answer on April 19. Its combination of several common letters alongside a tricky final-place X (all bundled up inside a word that has only been in common parlance for a few decades) seems to have been to blame here, and triggered the biggest spike in “World hint” searches in the US across the entire year. 

In second place, the verb EDIFY caused a similar spike in hint-searching on June 6. Hardly the most familiar or everyday of words, its tricky F and Y combo also seems to have contributed to its high ranking in the data.

Similarly, spelling and familiarity also seem to have proved a problem on August 13, when the answer was KEFIR (a kind of fermented yogurt-like milk drink), which came in third. The initial K and double-L of KNELL, a day later on August 14, gave it fourth place overall, while LORIS, on July 18, ended up in fifth, no doubt thanks to not too many people being familiar with this tailless tree-dwelling primate of India, Sri Lanka, and southeast Asia! 

Showing just how tricky letters such as Q and Z can prove in a World game, elsewhere the remainder of the top 10 was rounded out by QUOTA (March 30) in sixth, followed by HAZEL (April 7) in seventh, IDIOM (May 30) in eighth, IMBUE (August 8) in ninth, and GIZMO (November 11) in tenth.

Flipping the data on its head, conversely, revealed that the Wordle puzzles people found to be the easiest to solve were CHAIR (on September 11), BLUNT (September 24), and SPORT (May 27).

Breaking It Down by State

Breaking the data down state by state, meanwhile, showed that not everyone found the same words quite as difficult as others. Here, INBOX still came out on top as the most difficult word in no less than 24 different states (including Massachusetts, Florida, California, Texas, and the Carolinas), while KEFIR proved the most difficult word in no less than four states overall (Nebraska, Michigan, Missouri, and Arkansas).

It was followed by KNELL (Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Louisiana), IDIOM (South Dakota, Georgia, New Mexico), and EDIFY (New Hampshire, Colorado, New York), all with three states apiece, and QUOTA (Connecticut, Nevada) with two. Another of the top 10 words, LORIS, likewise proved the most difficult word in Tennessee.

The remaining 10 states, however, all had something different to offer. In Maine, it was found to be ASSAY on July 30 that caused the biggest spike in Google searches (no doubt thanks to its dual As and Ss).

Players in Vermont struggled with DATUM on June 5, while in nearby Delaware it was EXTOL on August 21. Elsewhere, the other states with uniquely difficult puzzles were Montana (GENIE, April 24), Idaho (INDIE, February 18), North Dakota (KNACK, January 15), Wyoming (MANGO, March 12), Alaska (CYBER, January 5), West Virginia (OZONE, April 23), and Hawaii (FUZZY, February 28). 

The state-by-state data also revealed which states are the guiltiest in resorting to Google for help with their daily Wordle fix—and uncovered something of a New England trend in the process. Top of the list here was Maine, where there is an average of 2,347 monthly Google searches for “Wordle hint” for every 100,000 people.

That narrowly put the Pine Tree State just a little way ahead of New Hampshire in second place (with 2,338 monthly searches per 100,000 people), followed by Massachusetts (2,290), Vermont (2,283), and Connecticut (1,996).

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