Four years of playing Wordle

The first wordle I did was on Jan 5, 2022, which I got in 1 guess because a friend came on Facebook and asked, "Has everyone done today's wordle?"  Then I went to find out what wordle was, thought about why they might be asking, and guessed right.

Since then, I've used that word as my first guess every day (with the exception of Apr 23, 2022, when a coworker started asking, "Has everyone done today's wordle?") and disabled Hard Mode because tiger is a terrible first word to use for Hard Mode (so many words end in "er").  After 4 years, starting tomorrow I'm going to start using a different first 

How have my four years of Wordle gone?  Well, recording that accurately was a bit of a challenge.  At first I used the original Wordle website, and then the Worde app, and finally the NYT app when the Worde app was no longer synced with the official Wordle of the day.  So my stats from the NYT app aren't right: 

Fortunately, I had taken screenshots of nearly all of my games, and eventually put them all into a spreadsheet, so that I have a more complete accounting:

Even cooler, I have a chart that shows the progression of my guesses over time, so you can quickly see when 3's started to outpace 4's and now 2's have started to outpace 5's.

The obvious question is: am I getting better at Wordle?!  Well, no, there are simply fewer words to choose from.  There are only 686 words left from the original Wordle list.  NYT sprinkled in 22 "new" words in 2025; unless that rate increases dramatically in 2026 and 2027, we realistically have roughly 2 years of OG Wordle left.

Solving wordle in 3 guesses or less

I've recorded 1216 attempted wordles, and finished 608 (or exactly half) in 3 guesses or less. This happened a little earlier than expected**, mostly due to a 14-day run of 2's and 3's.

Wordle games by number of guesses needed

Of course, the reason why I'm starting to get many more in 2 or 3 is because there are only 713 words left from the original wordle list. So far, NYT has peppered in 30 words that weren't in the original list, but it's unclear to me how many more they can add without getting obscure or including 's' plurals.

** I thought it would be around the 4th anniversary of my first wordle, on Jan 5.

EOY 2023 wordle update

There's one more day in 2023, but gonna post this as the EOY wordle status update.  It took a little while for me to use the NYT app instead of the site, and keep missing days here and there.  But a good year. 

(note: published here Jan 4, 2026; backdated to Dec 30, 2023 when I originally shared with friends on FB)