A Word'll Do

Each morning, I start my day with a healthy breakfast, two cups of dark roast coffee, and a leisurely game of Wordle. Not sure there’s anyone out there who hasn’t heard of the game sensation, recently bought by the New York Times, to the chagrin of many, but I am happily and irrevocably hooked by this sweet little word game.

For the uninitiated, Wordle is all about five-letter words, and figuring out which is the correct word on a given day. (And no looking them up, cheaters.) There are lots of strategies endlessly discussed on the Internet, but my own is pretty simple: Start with a word that has two or three vowels and a typical consonant blend. A gold letter turning up means it’s somewhere in the word; a green letter shows the correct positioning, and a gray one indicates it’s not in the word at all. Here’s the game board of a recent puzzle I did. It took me all 6 tries—the only time it’s happened to me.

I often start with a word like “ROUSE,” because it’s got three vowels—love those dipthongs. In this game, TRAIN only gave me the T, and not in the correct place. Since “TE” is a common ending in English, I went with a word that had a different vowel, U, and tried a different consonant blend, CH. All that did was gain me an E, and again, not in the right place. This is generally the step in which I take out my paper and gel pen and start scribbling. I started with the idea that the T could likely end the word and also assumed that the E was possibly the only vowel. I got lucky with the next choice, SPENT, which gave me the skeleton of the word. Once I tried the double E, I got very close.

However, in entering my guesses, I had made not one, but two rookie mistakes—repeating both the N and the H, after the game board had already grayed them out. Hence the the six tries. But without them, I may have never gotten to the correct answer, which was SWEET—in more ways than one!

How about you? Any Wordlers out there?