Welcome to The Wordle Review. Be warned: This article contains spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Wordle first, or scroll at your own risk.
This month’s featured artist is Simone Noronha. You can read more about her here.
★★★
Wordle 657 6/6
⬜⬜????????⬜ AROSE
????⬜⬜????⬜ STROP
????????⬜???????? COWLS
????????????⬜???? LOCKS
????????????⬜???? LOCHS
???????????????????? LOCUS
Here’s the thing: I am all for the quirks of the English language. They keep things interesting, especially if you are trying to develop a crossword theme, which is my forte.
I would like to meet the person who came up with the idea that there should be scores of words that differ by only one letter. Seriously, I’m not mad; I just want to talk. And whine. There would be plenty of whining.
Entering Wordle words where I am off by just one letter has to be the single most frustrating thing about having to guess a word in six tries. I play on a daily basis, and I can’t even count how many times I have chased the correct word down a list where I have all the letters right except for one, and there are apparently hundreds of possibilities to choose from.
After I’ve entered my six guesses, the game taunts me. “Here’s the correct word, you peon,” the game says, at least in my head, and it flashes the answer at me. I have been known to stick my tongue out at that sign. Your mileage may vary.
When it comes to starting the game, however, I have a secret advantage: I have gotten advice on opening words from Will Shortz, crossword editor here at The New York Times and puzzlemaster at NPR. I used to use the word RAISE, which left me with an average of four guesses. That was respectable as far as I was concerned, but when I interviewed him for an article about the game, he let on that his opening word was AROSE. Using that word first left him with an average that was slightly better than mine, so I immediately adopted his starting word. Because who would know better, right?
On the first try, I scored two letters, O and S. Both were in the wrong place. My next guess was STROP, a leather strap that is used to sharpen long shaving razors. Entering a rarely used word such as STROP made me feel smart for a moment, until I saw that I still had the same two letters, but in different incorrect positions. At least that helped narrow down my prospects.
My next guess was COWLS, and finally the O and the S were in the right places.
Now for the vexing part. I decided to try LOCKS because I had that letter L to place. All the cards flipped to green, except for the penultimate letter.
Ha! Easy enough, I reasoned. The answer must be LOCHS.
It was not LOCHS.
I ran the alphabet, out loud, on a New Jersey Transit bus into New York City. In hindsight, my singing the alphabet song to my phone might explain why no one sat next to me. And I finally settled on the letter U, which made the answer LOCUS.
“Fair enough,” I said to the game on my phone, also out loud on that same ride. I may have “borrowed” Will Shortz’s opening word and have developed the habit of talking to myself on the bus, but sometimes a puzzler has to do what a puzzler has to do.
Today’s word is LOCUS. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, its a noun meaning a “system of points, lines, etc. which satisfies one or more given conditions,” or, more simply, “a place.”
Today’s Statistics
This word is moderately challenging because of uncertainty, but a strategy can help.
The word contains a common letter pattern with five or six possible answers. Getting the answer in six guesses requires strategic choices at every guess.
Our Featured Artist
Simone Noronha is a New York-based South Asian illustrator and art director hailing from Dubai. She enjoys weaving narratives and intricate details into her imagery with saturated palettes and the moody lighting that has become her signature. In an interview with Wired, she said, “I like to think of illustrative style as just our natural flaws shining through and doing the best with it.”
Further Reading
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