Every now and then there’s a Wordle that’s so difficult it ends thousands of streaks in one go. Today’s Wordle is one of them.
According to WordleBot, the New York Times’ in-game helper tool, puzzle #1,214 has an average score of 5.7. That makes it the hardest since October 2022 and indeed the third hardest ever. Inevitably, avid Wordlers took to Twitter (or X, whatever) to share their stories of woe with the world. ‘Wordle 1,214 X’ is trending top of the social platform right now as the complaints pour in.
So, why is it so difficult, why are people so angry, and how could you have avoided failure today?
To answer those questions I’ll need to reveal the solution, so don’t read past this point if you haven’t played yet, because SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORDLE, GAME #1,214, ON TUESDAY, 15 OCTOBER 2024 will follow.
Third hardest ever
Okay, solution coming up, so really do stop reading if you don’t want to know what it is.
Or, if you haven’t played yet, head to my NYT Wordle today page for some last-minute hints.
**FINAL SPOILER ALERT**
Today’s answer is CORER. Yes, CORER.
At the time of writing, WordleBot has analyzed around 42,000 games, of which around 10,000 have been failures; that’s around 25%. Another 30%, meanwhile, only solved it on the final guess.
That explains the super-high average score of 5.7; yes, some people did solve it in three, four or five guesses (well done if you’re one of them!), but the majority either needed six or failed entirely.
I’ve recorded the WordleBot average scores each day since it launched in April 2022, meaning I now have a list of 926 games ranked by difficulty. By that measure, CORER is the third hardest ever, behind only PARER (game #454, average score 6.3) and MUMMY (#491, 5.8), both in late 2022.
The common theme in the failures today is evident from a glance at Twitter, where those familiar rows of green squares have a tell-tale gap from top to bottom in the center:
Wordle 1,214 X/6🟩🟨⬛⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩 this has to be the worst Wordle ever!October 15, 2024
Wordle 1,214 X/6*⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩the streak is over. That’s a lousy word.October 15, 2024
Wordle 1,214 X/6🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩Abysmal and I hate this app and I hate this worldOctober 15, 2024
A perfect Wordle storm
This pattern indicates that the game is one of the too-many-answers variety, where the solution only differs by one letter from several other words. Today, COVER, COWER and CODER were all arguably more likely answers, while COPER, COMER and COYER were also possibilities.
It’s a common scenario that plays out with ER-ending words, simply because there are so many of them. My analysis of every Wordle answer shows that 141 of the game’s 2,309 original solutions end in ER, making it by far the most likely ending. It’s therefore easy to identify the pattern – but incredibly difficult to then narrow down the correct start of the word.
That leads to the pattern above, where people who had CO-ER kept adding the wrong middle letter.
Not only is it a too-many-answers word, and an ER word, but CORER also contains a repeated letter, R. These make the game more difficult by default, because most people don’t like playing a repeat; it feels like throwing away a letter.
Finally, there’s the fact that CORER really isn’t a common word, to the extent that judging by the Twitter response, some people haven’t even heard of it at all.
Put all that together and you have all the ingredients for a nightmare Wordle – so it’s no surprise that so many people are failing.
So, what could you have done differently if you lost your streak today?
The best way to solve this kind of Wordle
I’ve played every Wordle ever and only lost once, plus my streak is now over 1,000 – so I know a thing or two about avoiding defeat in this game. That’s not exactly a superpower, but it’s the closest I come!
I scored a five today, and it should have been a four if not for a silly mistake. But I was never in danger of losing my streak, despite a terrible opening guess that left me with 967 possible solutions. That’s because I’ve learned what to do and not to do on days like this.
I’ll start by pointing out that if you play Wordle on hard mode, I can’t help you. On hard mode, you’re not allowed to leave out letters that are already green, meaning if you found yourself with that CO-ER pattern early on, you’ll have had no option but to blindly guess letters in search of the right one. There are good strategies out there for avoiding defeat on hard mode, but you’ll need to look elsewhere for what they are.
If you played in standard mode, however, then I do have some advice.
Firstly, you’ll want to identify as early as possible whether or not you’re dealing with an ER word. The obvious trick here is to make your start word one that includes both of those letters. STARE used to be my opener of choice for years until I switched to playing random for the sake of variety, and is one of WordleBot’s favorite words too. CRANE is the ‘bot’s first choice, or you could try CRATE, TRACE, CARET, CARTE, TASER, PARSE, SNARE or many others.
Any of these will point the way to an ER answer early on, but if your start word doesn’t include one or both of those letters you should fix that on the second guess unless you know for sure that it’s not a possibility (because one has been ruled out already, or a different letter is green at the end, for instance).
That’s what I did today. My random start word was VINYL, which was useless, but I followed up right away with STARE and uncovered the yellow R and E.
That was enough info for me to know that it was probably an ER word, so the next step was to confirm that while ruling in/out as many words as I could.
The best approach at this stage is to list as many words as you can, to see which letters might be in play. There were apparently 68 still open to me at this stage (WordleBot told me that afterwards), and I reckon I came up with about half of those. That was enough to give me a good steer as to the best letters to play next.
For instance, I could see that O was the most likely missing vowel to appear, featuring in the likes of BOXER, JOKER, GOFER and MOWER. P was also a common letter – POWER, POKER, DOPER, MOPER, PURER. And then there was the repeated R…
It might seem silly to play a repeated letter at this stage, but there are loads of answers that fit that pattern, including RIDER, RUDER, ROWER, ROGER CURER and indeed CORER – plus plenty of non-ER words that would still have fit (RECUR, ERROR, FREER).
So I put all that together and played ROPER, and that did the trick in that it reduced my options to only one. I then messed up by playing BORER rather than CORER, which was a shame, but ultimately finished with my streak intact.
The key thing, above everything I’ve said before, is to never just blindly guess letters in search of the missing one.
Let’s say you had CO-ER on the third guess – it would be tempting to guess COVER next, right? Don’t do it. Instead, look at which words it could be: COVER, COWER, CORER and CODER, for instance. Your next guess should then be something like VOWED, as that would rule in/out COVER, COWER and CODER depending on which one of V, W or D turned yellow/green. And if none of them did, the answer would be CORER.
It can go against instinct to do this, because in some ways you’re wasting a guess – you know it won’t be the answer. But scoring a five when it could have been a four is always preferable to failing entirely, so don’t be a hero – play it safe and live to fight another day.
This may not be of any consolation to you today if you lost your streak, but on the plus side it’s very unlikely we’ll get another word as difficult as this one for a while. Good luck!
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marc.mclaren@futurenet.com (Marc McLaren)
