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 Mark Pernice. You can read more about him here.
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Wordle 648 4/6
I play Wordle pretty much every day. It gives me a tiny little charge of triumph, a feeling I also get when the dentist says I have no cavities, or when I drop a stamped letter into the mailbox. There are certain days when my daughter, Alice, signs in as me on her phone and does the Wordle before I can get to it. Alice is completely untrustworthy, but she is good at Wordle.
I always use the word CRANE as my first word, based on some advice I received long ago from my husband, a former professional gambler. In this case, CRANE did not work out for me. For my second guess, I went with FLESH, a word I like because, like many words with Old English roots, it has a lot of gusto. On a purely aesthetic level, I was pretty satisfied, but FLESH didn’t get me very far, and I was beginning to feel some performance anxiety.
Alice joined me for the third round, and she suggested ZESTY. Using a letter as rare as Z struck me as a gamble, but also, I had to admit, stylish. And fortune favors the bold. For our fourth guess, we tried BESET. This was a probing attempt — what was the likelihood of a double E? — but, ding ding ding, that was the answer. We got it in four and walked away feeling distinctly above average.
Today’s word is BESET. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it is a verb meaning “to cover or set thickly with; stud.”
Today’s Statistics
Today’s word is moderately challenging because of the unfamiliarity of its letter pattern.
The letter pattern is unique enough that the answer can usually be found using elimination strategies within six guesses, but the word has duplicated letters, making it tricky.
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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