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.
I’m stepping in to write today’s column and will do so even more frequently in the coming weeks. If you’re a regular in the Gameplay comments sections, you’ve seen my face and name around here pretty often already. In fact, my first guess for Wordle actually came from the comments section of the forum itself. Someone had guessed INLET for a previous day, which allows you to knock out two vowels right away. I thought it was a strong start.
Unfortunately, INLET may have actually been one of the worst possible guesses. After I shot my shot, I saw five gray squares staring blankly back at me like unseeing eyes. This wasn’t my LUCKY day. (I would’ve used LUCKY for my next guess, but I knew the winning word didn’t have an L.) With nothing to work with, I wracked my brain for another guess.
I was thinking about how INLET might have been a great guess on another day: it has a familiar letter pattern and common vowels and consonants. Many Wordle solutions in the past have either contained or ended in T, for example. I was beginning to suspect that this Wordle had a repeated letter or some other tricky feature designed to trip players up. I went with CHARM, hoping it would bring me closer to the answer, and perhaps on a subconscious level, because it came to mind when I was hoping I’d get LUCKY.
That word brought me the H and the R, both in incorrect positions. Now at least I was a little bit closer to getting the answer right in three or four turns, and I had a hunch there was a double letter. I took out a pen and paper — it was time to get serious. I started writing down words beginning in H. Without an E or an I, I started to lose hope. I like to play my hunches and can get bogged down in the details of gameplay, and after fleshing out my H list, I didn’t want to spend time writing down words starting in R and including H, too. After discarding some possibilities because they had an incorrect letter, the answer was staring me right in the face: HURRY, employing that elusive final vowel in the alphabet.
I’m giving this one two stars because it’s an unimaginative word choice, and it has that tricky double-letter combination. It provided a challenge, but getting this one right wasn’t altogether very satisfying.
Today’s word is HURRY. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to moving or acting with haste — sort of the way I solved this puzzle after my flop of an initial guess.
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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