Wordle Difficulty Today — Puzzle #1971, Medium+

Today’s difficulty at a glance

Why it’s this hard

Three things push today’s puzzle up a notch:

• One vowel. The only vowel is E, so the middle of the word is hard to pin down. 611 of the 1,971 past answers have exactly one vowel.
• A double S. The letter S appears twice, and the second copy sits at the end of the word — easy to miss, because a guess only confirms the letter once.
• A lookalike. BLISS is one letter away. If you guess BLISS first, you can spend a turn on the wrong member of the pair.

What that means in play: a sound opener and a careful second guess should land it, and the rescue guess below settles the BL__S question if you are torn.

The pattern family

Today’s answer belongs to the BL__S family — words that share the pattern B-L-_-S and differ only in the third letter. The family has 2 words:

• BLISS — puzzle #1410
• Today’s answer — puzzle #1971 (tap to reveal it in the table below)

That is the trap: any guess that fits B-L-_-S still leaves two possible answers, and the only way to tell them apart is the third letter. The rescue guess below is built for exactly that choice.

Your rescue guess

Today’s rescue guess is BLISS. BLISS is not today’s answer — it is the other member of the BL__S family — and that is the point. BLISS tests the third letter: I in BLISS, E in today’s answer. If the third letter comes back green, the answer is BLISS; if it comes back grey, the answer has the other letter there, and you can play it with confidence.

Use it when you have two guesses left and you are torn between the two family members. Do not spend it as an opener, and do not spend it when you already know the third letter.

Hard Mode: in Hard Mode you must reuse every revealed letter, so a rescue guess is restricted — it only works if it keeps all your green and yellow letters in place.

Difficulty over the last 7 days

Every day’s score for the past week, newest first. Today’s answer is covered — tap to reveal it.

7-day average: 4.7/10 (Medium) — 33 points across 7 puzzles.

Hardest and easiest so far this month

November 2026 so far — puzzles #1961 to #1971. Ties are shown as ties; we do not invent an order between words with the same score.

Hardest

• 1. NUTTY — #1964, 4 Nov — 7/10, Medium+
• Tied 2nd — 6/10, Medium+: SCOOT, #1962, 2 Nov · POUCH, #1963, 3 Nov · today’s answer, #1971, 11 Nov
• Tied 5th — 5/10, Medium: PARCH, #1965, 5 Nov · DRECK, #1966, 6 Nov · FIRST, #1968, 8 Nov · LOAMY, #1969, 9 Nov

Easiest

• 1. PRATE — #1967, 7 Nov — 3/10, Fairly Easy
• Tied 2nd — 4/10, Medium: VIPER, #1961, 1 Nov · TRUCE, #1970, 10 Nov
• Tied 4th — 5/10, Medium: PARCH, #1965, 5 Nov · DRECK, #1966, 6 Nov · FIRST, #1968, 8 Nov · LOAMY, #1969, 9 Nov

How we score Wordle difficulty

Every answer gets one score, from 1 to 10, worked out from the word itself. We use no player data, no guess counts and no solve rates — we have no data about how other people played. The score is our own estimate. It is not an NYT or WordleBot figure.

The score comes from five inputs that can be computed from the answer and the full list of past answers:

• Letter rarity — 60% of the score. How uncommon the word’s letters are across all 1,971 past answers. E appears in 47.0% of answers, A in 39.6%, R in 36.3%, O in 30.0% and T in 29.8% — common letters pull the score down, rare letters (J, Q, X, Z, V, W, F) push it up. The rarity term is normalised before it is weighted.
• Vowel count — 25%. Fewer vowels is harder: 0 vowels is hardest, 1 is hard, 2 is the baseline and 3 or more is easier. Counting A, E, I, O and U (Y does not count as a vowel here), 8 past answers have no vowel, 611 have one, 1,148 have two, 202 have three and 3 have four or more.
• Repeated letter — 15%. A word with a doubled letter is harder to pin down — a guess confirms the letter once, but you still have to place the second copy. 614 of the 1,971 past answers (31.1%) have a repeated letter.
• Lookalike count. How many other answers sit one letter away from this one. Today’s answer has one: BLISS. A lookalike is what makes a good guess go wrong.
• Pattern-family size. How many answers share the same pattern — today’s is the BL__S family, with 2 words. The family and its lookalikes are shown with the score, because they explain the trap; they are not added to the score a second time.

Put together: score = 1 + 9 × (0.60 × letter rarity + 0.25 × (1 − vowels ÷ 5) + 0.15 × repeated letter), rounded to the nearest whole number and kept between 1 and 10.

The bands. Fairly Easy 0–3.4, Medium 3.5–5.4, Medium+ 5.5–7.4, Hard 7.5–10. As whole numbers that means 1–3 is Fairly Easy, 4–5 Medium, 6–7 Medium+ and 8–10 Hard. The same bands are used on the home page and in the full archive, so a word never has two different labels.

Calibration. Before launch we scored all 1,971 past answers with the same function. The result: Fairly Easy 161, Medium 1,216, Medium+ 537, Hard 57. The hardest list is the cluster every Wordle player knows: FUZZY (10/10, the only 10) on top, followed by BUGGY, DIZZY, FIZZY, FLUFF, GUMMY, JAZZY, JIFFY, MUGGY and MUMMY at 9/10. The easiest are ARISE, ATONE, EERIE, IRATE and RAISE, all 2/10. Today’s answer scores 6/10, Medium+ — harder than 70% of all 1,971 past answers.

One word that looks wrong: PRATE. Our method scores PRATE 3/10, Fairly Easy — all common letters (P, R, A, T, E), two vowels, no doubles — while methods built on player results rate it much harder. The difference is the method (letters versus player results), not the word: PRATE is easy as a set of letters and hard as a choice, because its PR__E family has 11 words.

Each day’s score is set once, in the morning, and does not change during the day. If we ever change the function, every published score — here, on the home page and in the archive — changes with it, through the function, never by hand-editing a number on a page.

How to use this page

Check the score first thing in the morning, before you play. If it is Medium+ or Hard, start with a common-letter opener, then use the rescue guess when you have two guesses left and you are torn between two words from the same family. If it is Fairly Easy, the answer is usually a common word — trust the obvious guess.

For today’s hints and the full answer list, see today’s Wordle hints and the full archive of past Wordle answers.

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