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 665 5/6
⬜⬜????????⬜ CRANE
⬜????⬜????⬜ HAUNT
????⬜????????⬜ AXONS
????⬜???????????? AMONG
???????????????????? AGONY
What’s another word for extreme physical or mental suffering? Hold that thought.
I’ll admit that when it comes to word games, I am an enthusiastic participant and a terribly sore loser. I actually quit playing Wordle last year after some word that I’ve long forgotten ruined my streak. It was my streak, and I loved it! I’d worked so hard on it. Luckily, I had the sweet, warm embrace of my Duolingo streak, so I committed myself to learning another language. (I just hit one year!)
For this puzzle, I started with CRANE, which I believe is the best word to use. Back when I played Wordle more regularly, I loved using the bot to analyze my game, but it also made me feel kind of bad — as if I weren’t logical enough or careful enough in my gameplay. If this sounds like something I should be addressing in therapy, please know that it has come up several times.
CRANE got me a green N (Yay!) and a yellow A (Boo.). When a vowel gets marked as yellow, and it’s an A, that is so frustrating. What if the word had more than one A, like SAUNA? I took a deep breath and focused on the process of elimination, desperately trying not to use letters that had already been grayed out or to accidentally move the N in my rush to solve. So, I went for HAUNT, which put the A in a new position and eliminated H, U, and T. Another yellow A and no new letters unveiled. Ugh.
This is where I got stuck. Either the word begins with an A, or it ends with an A. When I’m down bad like this in Wordle, I start putting X’s in any spaces where I don’t know the letter because it helps me visualize. AXXNX or XXXNA. All that X work inspired me to try AXONS, which according to Encyclopaedia Britannica is a “portion of a nerve cell (neuron) that carries nerve impulses away from the cell body.” Thank you, ninth-grade biology.
Now I had THREE GREEN BOXES! The word definitely began with A and there was an O before the N. Great. Easy peasy. It was definitely AMONG. I’ve never been more sure of anything. For some reason, I started thinking of the mobile game Among Us, which was a very big part of my early pandemic. And as in Among Us, I was stabbed in the back by a word I thought I could trust.
As soon as that G turned yellow, I knew that I had just been “and sometimes Y’d.” We’re taught to go through the five main vowels before ever, ever considering a Y, the sneakiest vowel of them all. But if I’d considered Y earlier, then I might have arrived at AGONY sooner. How poetic.
Maybe this was simply an exercise in doing the unexpected. Maybe I should have started with GRAVY or MANGO. They would have gotten me there sooner, and they would have been much more fun than “any large wading bird of the family Gruidae.” Maybe it’s time to start playing Wordle with a little less logic and a lot more self-confidence. We all eventually lose our streaks — don’t let me know if you haven’t; I’m still reeling — so you might as well have fun doing it.
Today’s word is AGONY. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it’s a noun meaning “the suffering of intense physical or mental pain.”
Today’s Statistics
Information about the difficulty of today’s Wordle and how Times readers solved it will be available once more readers have had the chance to play.
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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