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.
★★★★
⬜????????⬜⬜ PEACH
⬜????⬜⬜???? TASTE
⬜⬜⬜???????? FILED
???????????????????? BREAD
Wordle 649 4/6
In college, I started playing tournament-level Scrabble. Not because I particularly wanted to (I didn’t) or because I was particularly good (I wasn’t), but because I was trying to get laid. I did, eventually, and stopped playing. But I’ve retained a few habits from those days, including always wishing I could move the mixed-up letters of word games into any order I please. Spelling Bee kind of has this function, but Wordle does not. Though I love Wordle, this fact drives me nuts. I would like to be able to slot letters into their spots out of order, as a way of helping me to unfocus my eyes and imagine the final word as an image, the way I’d frantically move Scrabble tiles around their rack until a word presented itself to me. (The fact that this was my strategy should be a clue as to why I didn’t have more success at the game.)
In any case, it is my belief that I’d be better at Wordle if it had this mechanic, which of course it does not.
I always start with a word that has some combination of the letters S, E, D, R, T and A. They are the letters my brain wants to pin down immediately. They are among the most commonly used in the English language, both in general and as the first and final letters of words. I have been known to start with TIMES, DREAM, DRAMS, READS, STEAD. Sometimes none of those letters are usable. That’s how I know it’s going to be a bad day.
But today was not a bad day. PEACH, which I used here, is not among my usual starting words. Sometimes I’m just feeling — rowdy. It did, however, contain my two vowels. (Had I followed my own rules, I would have also nailed the presence of the R and the D and could have gotten this puzzle in three or even two guesses. Rowdiness is a risk.) I confess I hesitated before playing “PEACH” because when I played Scrabble I absolutely hated getting a C. I would have rather had a Z or even a Q. But still. PEACH it was. The heart is a feral and unknown place.
Four out of five stars — pleasant to solve, and bread is delicious.
Today’s word is BREAD. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it’s a noun that refers to food baked from a leavened, kneaded dough, commonly mixed with water and yeast.
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
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. Mr. 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 pictorial illustration 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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