Wordle players faced one of the tougher challenges of the month Tuesday, with puzzle number 1,837 featuring a word containing three repeated letters, the second time in a matter of days that the daily New York Times puzzle has thrown a triple-letter curveball at solvers.

The answer to Tuesday’s Wordle is PUPPY, a five-letter noun referring to a young dog. The word contains just one vowel alongside four consonants, with the letter “P” appearing three separate times, a pattern that made the puzzle considerably harder than average to crack using typical opening strategies. According to the New York Times’ own WordleBot tool, which analyzes daily player performance, the average solver needed 4.2 guesses to land on the correct answer when playing in easy mode, and 4.1 guesses under the game’s harder rule set, putting Tuesday’s puzzle solidly in more difficult territory compared with a typical day.

Part of what made the word so tricky is that it avoids nearly all of the most commonly used letters in the English language, the building blocks most players rely on during their opening guesses. Popular starting words such as ORATE, frequently used by solvers because it efficiently tests several high-frequency letters at once, performed especially poorly against Tuesday’s answer, leaving an unusually large pool of more than 250 possible remaining words after a single guess, according to WordleBot’s analysis. Other commonly recommended opening words fared only modestly better; CLIPS narrowed the field to roughly 34 possible answers, while TARPS brought that number down further to about 28, both still leaving solvers with considerably more uncertainty than a typical day’s puzzle.

The puzzle’s repeated-letter structure added another layer of difficulty. Wordle answers occasionally reuse the same letter more than once, a pattern seen in past answers such as SHEEP and BLOOM, and puzzle guides have repeatedly reminded players not to rule out a letter too quickly after a single attempt, since the word may still contain that letter in a different position. Tuesday’s puzzle pushed that principle further than usual by repeating the same letter three separate times, a configuration that has appeared only rarely in the puzzle’s history.

Notably, Tuesday’s word arrived just two days after another triple-letter answer, EMCEE, appeared in the puzzle over the weekend, marking the second time in a short span that players encountered this unusual letter pattern. That back-to-back occurrence surprised even some of the puzzle’s most regular players and longtime trackers, who noted they hadn’t expected to see another triple-letter word so soon after the previous one.

Tuesday’s puzzle was edited by Tracy Bennett, who has overseen Wordle’s daily puzzle selection for the New York Times since the publication acquired the game. Wordle was originally created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021 as a project for his partner, before it surged in popularity at the end of that year and went viral globally in January 2022. The New York Times subsequently purchased the game for a seven-figure sum the following month, folding it into its broader suite of daily puzzle offerings, which now includes Connections, Strands, the Mini Crossword and several other games. Both the Times and Wardle have stated publicly that Wordle will remain free to play, distinguishing it from the subscription-based access required for some of the publication’s other puzzle offerings.

The core mechanics of Wordle have remained unchanged since its original release: players are given six attempts to guess a hidden five-letter English word, with the game providing color-coded feedback after each guess. A green tile indicates a letter is correct and in the right position, a yellow tile signals a letter is part of the word but placed incorrectly, and a gray tile shows a letter does not appear in the word at all. A new puzzle is released once per day at midnight in each player’s local time zone, and unlike many other daily digital games, the entire global player base receives the exact same word each day, a structural choice that has helped fuel much of the social-sharing culture surrounding the game, including the now-familiar grid of colored squares many players post to social media after completing each day’s puzzle.

For players who came up short on Tuesday’s puzzle, strategy guides accompanying the day’s answer suggested that solvers down to their final two guesses should generally avoid speculative or unlikely word choices and instead favor options that satisfy every clue already revealed by the board, reserving riskier or more exploratory guesses for the earlier rounds of a puzzle when more information remains unknown.

Beyond the daily Wordle puzzle itself, the New York Times Games section has continued to expand its broader portfolio of word and logic puzzles, publishing daily hints and solutions across titles including Strands, Connections and its various spinoff formats, reflecting the franchise’s continued growth as one of the more dominant fixtures in the casual daily puzzle gaming space since its rapid rise to prominence in 2022.