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 666 5/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜???? SPORE
⬜????⬜????⬜ MEATY
????????⬜⬜⬜ ETHIC
⬜????????⬜???? FLEET
???????????????????? DWELT
Almost superstitiously, I prefer to start with a word that reflects my surroundings or my mind-set. I once Wordled-in-one with FLIRT, thanks to the screwball comedy I’d seen the night before (“Love Is News,” so good). But another time I opened with WATER as it poured outside my window, and it took me three more tries to discover RAINY was the answer. Sometimes the Muse mumbles.
Today I kicked off with a seasonal word. Trees and flowers are blooming, and pollen is wreaking its havoc (ooh, HAVOC’s interesting). This earned me exactly one pollen-yellow tile. Time to change my tack.
Next I tried a food word, since food is my kind of thing. Just one more blot of yellow.
Entering row three with no green tiles, I started to sweat. I made a second cup of tea and hoped for fresh inspiration. But my third turn turned up nothing new.
Round four brought, as it so often does, a measure of paralysis. I checked off the narrowing options in my head, weighing the merits of two slightly archaic, hobbit-y words that pleased me. But since they were in the past tense, I brushed them aside and plunged ahead instead with a strategic word that doubled a yellow letter to see if I could find its position on the grid. I found it, and another letter besides!
Smelling blood at last, I threw caution to the wind and returned to one of the past-tense, archaic words. Bingo! Well, it wasn’t bingo, but I did get it right on my fifth round.
Lesson learned: Like with standardized tests, it’s first thought, best thought. The game is as much gut intuition as skill.
Final review: 4 out of 5, knocking off a star for the fiddly past tense.
Today’s word is DWELT. It’s the past tense of DWELL, and it means “resided” or “lived” in a place, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary.
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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