Welcome to The Wordle Review. Be warned, this article contains spoilers for today’s puzzle. Scroll no further if you haven’t solved it yet.
This month’s featured artist is Mark Pernice. You can read more about him here.
★★★★★
Wordle 641 3/6
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My Wordle pod consists of me; my wife, Justine; and our best friends Michael and Stephen, who live in Kentucky. Insomniacs and early risers, we collect our scores as the day breaks, competing to be the earliest bird with the lowest score, and post the results in a text thread that also includes Twitter memes. We are secretive about strategies and starting words and disdain the help of bots — we’re intellectuals, for goodness’ sake — with their tips about multiple vowels and the most common consonants.
We’re all pretty solid four-guess Wordle solvers. I don’t really aspire to more. A five or a six will cloud my day with thoughts of cognitive decline. Ones and twos seem fluky and show-offish. But a few consecutive three-guess-or-better days is pure bliss, a jolt of smug gratification that will last at least through Spelling Bee. I’m especially pleased when the game vindicates my heterodox first-word philosophy, which is to disdain obvious choices like ADIEU and STARE for risky (and sometimes risqué) opening gambits.
My first guess today was ORBIT, which has often served me well. The green square in the last position was a good break, since there aren’t a huge number of English words that end in T. The second guess — PLEAT — knocked out a lot of consonant combinations and eliminated the E from one of its most common spots. TENET seemed like a possibility, but I mistrust repeated letters, especially when there are still vowels on the table. Really, there was only one solution, DUVET, and it happened to resonate with my desire, on a chilly, gray day, to crawl back into bed and drift into the untroubled sleep of a three-guess solver, to be awakened only by the text notification when Michael, Justine or Stephen beats my score.
I rate this Wordle five out of five stars! I also love that it’s a French word.
Today’s word is DUVET. It’s a noun. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to a comforter with a cover on the outside and down on the inside.
Today’s statistics
Today’s word is moderately challenging because of its unfamiliarity.
The letter pattern is unique enough that the answer can usually be found using elimination strategies within six guesses, but it’s a relatively niche term.
Our Featured Artist
Mark Pernice is an award-winning illustrator, art director and designer. He runs the multidisciplinary design studio OOO alongside his creative directing partner, Elana Schlenker. Pernice injects his personality and style into brand illustrations using a variety of details, textures and messages. “I’m not that interested in making obvious illustrations, and I don’t want to shoehorn in overused visual iconography unless there’s a bit of a fun twist or mystery,” he said in an interview with It’s Nice That.
Further Reading
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