Warning: today's Wordle answer is the fifth hardest ever – so be careful out there

Wordle is a simple game in theory but sometimes a very difficult game in practice, and today's puzzle rams that point home with force.

According to WordleBot, the game's helpful (albeit snarky) AI tool, puzzle #1,426 has an average score of 5.5 from the 40,000-plus people who have used it so far today. By that measure it's the hardest Wordle puzzle since January and the fifth hardest of all time.

A quick browse of Twitter/X tells the story of the day, with 'Wordle 1,426 X' trending right at the top of the platform already. And that's before most players in the US have even woken up.

So, what's the problem? To answer that I'll need to reveal the solution, so don't read past this point if you haven't played yet. Maybe get some hints from my NYT Wordle today article if you need them.

SPOILERS FOR TODAY'S WORDLE, GAME #1,426, ON THURSDAY, 15 MAY 2025 will follow.

Fifth hardest ever

**FINAL SPOILER ALERT**

Right, last chance to stop reading before I reveal the solution.

Today's answer is EAGER, so yes it's an ER word. No surprise, right?

It's pretty easy to get a list of the most difficult Wordles ever, because WordleBot records the average for every game that's been played.

In turn, I've kept a list of those averages since the 'Bot launched in April 2022, meaning I now have a spreadsheet ranking 1,138 games by difficulty.

By that measure, EAGER is the equal fifth hardest ever, behind only PARER (game #454, average score 6.3), MUMMY (#491, 5.8), CORER (#1214, 5.7) and ROWER (#1310, 5.6). It's also level with JAZZY (#712).

Three of those six words end in ER, which is probably the most difficult type of game to solve – although personally, I have an even more hated Wordle format.

That theme continues as you go down the list; of all games with a 5.0 average or above, of which there have now been 28, a total of 13 have ended ER. That's almost half of the most difficult games ever (obviously).

Why are ER words so tough to solve?

The problem with ER words is simply that 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.

You might think this would make it easier to solve, because these words are easy to identify – not least because E and R are both very common letters, and therefore played by lots of people in their start word.

However, the sheer number of them can make it really tough to then narrow down the other three letters. And the problem is made worse because almost all letters can appear in those first three slots.

Not all ER words are difficult, of course. LASER, for instance, had a super-low average of 3.3 back in April 2024 (game #1038). But that's because those other three letters were L, A and S – which are all very common in their own right, and which appear in many of the best Wordle start words.

By contrast, the other letters in EAGER are a repeated E, A and G. The fact that the E is repeated makes it a lot harder to identify, because people don't generally play letters twice unless they think there's a strong likelihood that there will be a repeat. Doing it early always feels like throwing away the chance to gain information.

All of that leads to what I call the too-many-answers problem, where the solution only differs by one letter from several other words. Today, PAGER, WAGER and LAGER were all alternative answers, and may have occurred to people before they thought of repeating that E at the start.

This leads to the classic Wordle fail pattern, with four or five guesses missing one or two letters in vertical lines:

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