Technologies

New Study Reveals Wordle’s Top 10 Toughest Words of 2025

Did you get INBOX? What about EDIFY? Plus: The New York Times has a sort of Spotify Wrapped for Wordle players.

Did Wordle keep you busy this year? Some words are more challenging than others. INBOX — the Wordle answer on April 19 — was this year’s most difficult Wordle puzzle in the US, according to the language learning platform Preply, which connects learners with tutors.

Preply identified the trickiest word by analyzing Google search interest for «Wordle hint» across every puzzle from January to November. It selected the toughest puzzles by examining which ones «produced the largest relative spikes nationally and within each US state.»

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Preply listed nine other words that ranked as the hardest in 2025. (It looks like Aug. 13-14 was a particularly stressful period for puzzlers.) Here’s a look at the top 10.

INBOX (April 19)
EDIFY (June 6)
KEFIR (Aug. 13)
KNELL (Aug. 14)
LORIS (July 18)
QUOTA (March 30)
HAZEL (April 7)
IDIOM (May 30)
IMBUE (Aug. 8)
GIZMO (Nov. 11)

EDIFY — which means to instruct or improve — and KEFIR — a fermented milk drink — may have led to a lot of Google searches.

But not all Wordles were brain-busters. Preply found the easiest puzzles to solve in 2025 were CHAIR (Sept. 11), BLUNT (Sept. 24) and SPORT (May 27).

Spotify Wrapped for Wordle, kind of

You’re familiar with Spotify Wrapped, the music service’s annual roundup of each user’s year in Spotify songs. There’s a similar yearly recap for YouTube videos. Now, The New York Times is getting in on the trend with a year-end recap for players of Wordle and its other games, like Connections.

For Wordle, the Times’ Year in Games roundup shows how many days you solved a puzzle, what time of day you did most of your solving, which Wordle you solved the fastest, how many guesses it took you on average and your most common starter word.

For Connections, it shows how many times you solved it without any mistakes, what the year’s trickiest puzzle was (hint: that one with all the symbols) and which color category you usually solved first.

For Spelling Bee, it shows how many words you found all year, what your longest found word was, how many times you used all seven letters to find a pangram and how many times you reached Genius level.

For Strands, it shows how many times you solved it without any hints and what your longest streak was.

The roundup also shows what your most-played game was this year. (Connections for the win!) As with other similar roundups, you’re able to share your result summary if you want.

For more coverage on puzzles, you can check out CNET’s daily answers and hints for Wordle, The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands. And you can view our guide to the most popular letters to make your starter word as strong as possible.

Technologies

Ultrahuman Ring Pro Brings Better Battery Life, More Action and Analysis

The company’s new flagship smart ring stores more data, too. But that doesn’t really help Americans.

Sick of your smart ring’s battery not holding up? Ultrahuman’s new $479 Ring Pro smart ring, unveiled on Friday, offers up to 15 days of battery life on a single charge. The Ring Pro joins the company’s $349 Ring Air, which boosts health tracking, thanks to longer battery life, increased data storage, improved speed and accuracy and a new heart-rate sensing architecture. The ring works in conjunction with the latest Pro charging case.

Ultrahuman also launched its Jade AI, which can act as an agent based on analysis of current and historical health data. Jade can synthesize data from across the company’s products and is compatible with its Rings.

«With industry-leading hardware paired with Jade biointelligence AI, users can now take real-time actionable interventions towards their health than ever before,» said Mohit Kumar, CEO of Ultrahuman.

No US sales

That hardware isn’t available in the US, though, thanks to the ongoing ban on Ultrahuman’s Rings sales here, stemming from a patent dispute with its competitor, Oura Ring. It’s available for preorder now everywhere else and is slated to ship in March. Jade’s available globally.

Ultrahuman says the Ring Pro boosts battery life to about 15 days in Chill mode — up to 12 days in Turbo — compared to a maximum of six days for the Air. The Pro charger’s battery stores enough for another 45 days, which you top off with Qi-compatible wireless charging. In addition, the case incorporates locator technology via the app and a speaker, as well as usability features such as haptic notifications and a power LED.

The ring can also retain up to 250 days of data versus less than a week for the cheaper model. Ultrahuman redesigned the heart-rate sensor for better signal quality. An upgraded processor improves the accuracy of the local machine learning and overall speed.

It’s offered in gold, silver, black and titanium finishes, with available sizes ranging from 5 to 14.

Jade’s Deep Research Mode is the cross-ecosystem analysis feature, which aggregates data from Ring and Blood Vision and the company’s subscription services, Home and M1 CGM, to provide historical trends, offer current recommendations and flag potential issues, as well as trigger activities such as A-fib detection. Ultrahuman plans to expand its capabilities to include health-adjacent activities, such as ordering food.

Some new apps are also available for the company’s PowerPlug add-on platform, including capabilities such as tracking GLP-1 effects, snoring and respiratory analysis and migraine management tools.

Technologies

The FCC Just Approved Charter’s $34.5B Cox Purchase. Here’s What It Means for 37M Customers

Technologies

Spotify Expands Into Audiobook Rankings With Weekly Charts

The feature is available to both free users and Premium subscribers. Wuthering Heights is reaching the heights on both the US and UK charts.

If you’re a Spotify user, you may be familiar with features like the year-end summary Wrapped, as well as your daily usage stats. Now, the service has a new popularity chart tracking audiobooks.

Spotify’s audiobook charts are now available to free and Premium users within the service’s Audiobooks hub. While only Premium users receive 15 hours of audiobook listening per month, the company offers a larger selection of titles you can buy.

US charts and UK charts are both available now.

Read more: Best Music Streaming Services for 2026

Spotify says that the audiobook charts will help customers discover new and popular titles in real time.

«As we’ve proven with Music and Podcasts Charts, when content is easier to access, discover, and enjoy, the demand grows,» said Duncan Bruce, Spotify’s director of audiobook partnerships and licensing, in a statement on Friday.

Spotify launched audiobooks in 2022, and has since added features such as the AI catchup tool Recaps and PageMatch, which lets you swap more easily between a printed book and the audio version.

Spotify Premium currently costs $13 a month and includes more than 100 million songs, as well as audiobooks. Spotify Premium is currently CNET’s Editors’ Choice for best music streaming service.

The current US audiobooks chart lists Emily Brontë’s romantic classic Wuthering Heights as the top listen, followed by James Clear’s self-help book Atomic Habits and Freida McFadden’s psychological thriller The Housemaid. Audiobook popularity is also broken down by genre, with charts for romance, mystery and thriller books, self-help, science fiction and fantasy, biography and memoir, business and careers, teen and young adult, religion and spirituality, history, and parenting and relationships.

Powered by its blockbuster movie adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, Wuthering Heights also leads the overall chart for the UK.