Wordle’s Toughest Word Caused 60 Percent of Players to Break their Streaks

One hardest word caused more than half of the Wordle community to break their longest winning streaks. 

What is the Complete Story?

As you’re always searching for hints and answers to solve your puzzles, Wordle used to publish daily tips and tricks just to help you as other games do. However, searching for answers is cheating. 

Mainly, people don’t cheat just because they want to solve the puzzle. It could be that they want to maintain their winning streaks. The game is always used to keep track of the number of times you’ve played, won and lost. 

Also, it tracks your current streak. Your longest winning streak will reset to zero if you lost even one game. How sad will it be? Therefore, you need to go for weeks or months without missing a single word. 

Suppose your 71-day streak is on-line, and the grid shows one of those streak breaking words like CA_ER, which could be CATER or CABER or CAGER or maybe CAPER. This time you can cheat a little bit as you don’t want to start your streak from nil. 

What Word Caused 60% of Wordle Players to Break their Streaks?

This week, the Game Developers Conference was held in San Francisco, where Executive Producer of New York Times Games, Zoe Bell, revealed the most challenging word, PARER. It means a small sharp knife used to pare vegetables and fruits. 

Earlier, around 15% of players have their streaks broken on average. 

But on 16 September, 60% of players lost their streaks due to the word PARER. Zoe called it a skyscraper word, which makes the grid look like tall buildings. Also, it has a letter that’s used twice, which makes it extra tricky. 

People incorrectly guess it as PALER, PAPER or PAGER. This type of word could be one of the reasons people are accusing Wordle has become tougher than before. But during the GDC talk, Zoe confirmed that PARER didn’t make the game harder. 

Less family-friendly words like WENCH, SLAVE and LYNCH from Josh Wardle’s original list did that. But for a very long time they haven’t done anything to make the puzzle more difficult after launching Wordle editor in October.