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 661 4/6
????⬜⬜⬜???? ADIEU
????????⬜⬜???? ULTRA
⬜????????????⬜ CAULK
???????????????????? QUALM
I was raised in a family of Scrabble demons, so whatever WordleBot tells me, I can’t bring myself to start with SLATE. In Scrabble an S is a rare jewel, not a run-of-the-mill consonant.
First guess: I nearly always play ADIEU first, because I’m a process-of-elimination player and I need to get my vowels in hand. Worldle has taught me that there are actually surprisingly few ways to combine letters in the English language, and most of the consonants are barely used.
Second guess: Two vowels on the board. Now I want to deploy L, R and T, the most common English consonants (a well-known fact to us members of NASPA, the North American Scrabble Players Association). It’s rarely possible to make a word with all three, but today it is: ULTRA.
Third guess: With L, U and A all in the wrong place, I am forced to contemplate the possibility of LUAUS. I know you have to use words with repeating letters sometimes (thanks again, English language), but it throws off my process-of-elimination playing style, so I try not to. CAULK works.
Fourth guess: Wow, those vowels are all over the place. But, by sifting through the yellows, I can fix the center letters of the word as UAL. I type in XUALX (with the Xs acting as blanks, a visual that helps me go through the remaining letters). Since “UA” doesn’t seem to follow any of the usual consonants, I circle back to the ones I ignore most of the time Q, X, Z and J. Fortunately, QUALM jumps out.
Five stars, because this is exactly the kind of solution my family Wordle group respects. (Unlike, say, MARCH or COUGH. Don’t get us started.)
Today’s word is QUALM. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to a sudden misgiving, “twinge of conscience” or feeling of nausea.
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 South Asian illustrator and art director from Dubai who is based in New York. 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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