Today’s Wordle answer is the hardest this year, with an average score of 5.4, and ‘Wordle 1037
Today’s Wordle is the hardest we’ve had so far in 2024, but that doesn’t describe how tough it is. ‘Wordle 1,037
Solving it in six guesses or less and maintaining your Wordle streak will be a challenge, that’s for sure. But there are ways to play it to avoid heartache (or the Wordle equivalent; this is just a game after all). These strategies may be too late to help you now, but they can save you the next time a game like this comes along. And it will be.
To explain what they are, I have to add them SPOILERS FOR TODAY’S WORD, GAME #1,037, ON SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2024. So don’t read on if you haven’t already done so. Keep in mind that you might want some Wordle tips before you do this.
How hard?
Okay, let’s talk about today’s Wordle word and exactly how difficult it was.
The answer to game #1,037, assuming you’ve played it by now **FINAL SPOILER ALERT**is JOLLY – and it really causes a lot of problems.
The way I estimate the difficulty of each Wordle is by consulting WordleBot, the New York Times’ AI-powered utility tool. Every day, WordleBot analyzes the games of everyone who plays and reports an average score for them. And today it is said that people solve the problem in an average of 5.4 guesses. That’s based on a random sample of 1,778,346 Wordlers who have played it so far – so it’s a pretty sizable survey.
I’ve been tracking WordleBot’s average scores every day since the tool launched in April 2022, which means I now have a list of 749 games organized by difficulty. By that metric, JOLLY is the hardest Wordle yet in 2024, comfortably beating the previous holder of that title, PIPER, which was a 5.2 game in February.
But that only tells half the story, as JOLLY is in fact the toughest Wordle since June 2023, and even the fourth worst ever. Only PARER (average score 6.3), MUMMY (5.8) and JAZZY (5.5) were more difficult, while FOYER, RIPER and JOKER all had the same average of 5.4.
It’s not surprising that many players are struggling. Approximately 233,791 Wordlers have failed to resolve the issue at the time of writing, representing 13% of the total. That’s a super high failure rate.
Check Twitter and you can see the reaction, with dozens of players posting their games and complaining about their luck:
Word 1,037. 6 #Wordle1037👍😉🤣 pic.twitter.com/RWbFz6v5bKApril 20, 2024
Wordel 1,037 . Good luck pic.twitter.com/GjBRBRE9IEApril 21, 2024
Wordle 1,037 z8H0bsApril 21, 2024
A quick glance is enough to see one of the main causes of this plethora of failures – namely the problem of too many answers. But it is far from the only one.
Too many answers
Many of the most difficult words ever have a common theme, which is too many answers. In other words, the solution is one that could have been a different word if you had changed just one (or sometimes two) letters.
There are several of these traps, for example -IGHT, -OUND and -ATCH. The first of these has nine possible solutions: WIGHT, EIGHT, RIGHT, TIGHT, LIGHT, FIGHT, SIGHT, MIGHT, and NIGHT. The second has eight – WOUND, ROUND, POUND, HOUND, FOUND, SOUND, MOUND and BOUND – while the third has seven (WATCH, PATCH, LATCH, HATCH, MATCH, BATCH and CATCH).
The -OLLY trap, meanwhile, is on par with -ATCH, as it has seven definitive answers: LOLLY, JOLLY, HOLLY, GOLLY, FOLLY, MOLLY, and DOLLY. It is one of the worst possible formats.
These types of games are a nightmare if you play on hard mode, where you can easily get stuck with four green letters and be forced to guess letters at random in the search for the right one. So my first tip is to simply don’t play on hard mode! Or, if you do, be aware that these things can happen, and guard against them from the very beginning.
Even worse, the final answer was JOLLY, which starts with the least common letter in the game. I prove this in my analysis of each Wordle answer; J only appears in 27 of Wordle’s 2,309 original solutions, so it’s not a letter most people use often.
Add to that the fact that JOLLY also features a repeated letter – which in itself is less common than getting five separate letters – and you have a game set up to make your life difficult.
How to play and win one of these games
The key to beating a game like JOLLY – unless you’re playing on hard mode – is to limit your options as early as possible.
What this means is not chasing a high score, because that’s where disaster lurks. Let’s say you determined on the third guess that this was an -OLLY word, which isn’t unreasonable depending on what your starting word was. In that scenario, it can be tempting to guess common words like FOLLY, say, or HOLLY, in the search for that average score of 4/6.
DO NOT DO THIS.
Instead, once you realize there are more answers left than guesses, the only way to consistently beat Wordle is to find a limiting word that eliminates as many options as possible. In my example above it was MAYBE – because that ruled out MOLLY, GOLLY and HOLLY all at once, leaving me with just JOLLY to play the next time.
This goes against many people’s instincts because it involves omitting green letters, which just feels wrong. But it’s what WordleBot does, and the bot is much smarter than you or me.
In some cases you may even have to play two such words, and that’s actually what I did; LOWLY, whose gamble I played before MIGHT, was chosen in part to rule out LOLLY as an option. The most important thing is to identify what all the options are, make a list of all those possible letters (in this case F, H, G, L, M, D, and J), and then come up with words that match as many of them as possible. contain the letters. them possible.
You might consider this an overly cautious and perhaps cowardly way to play Wordle, but if you value your streak, then this is the only approach that makes sense.