Today’s Wordle Review: April 29, 2023

[ad_1]

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 679 5/6

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ MORON
🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜ RETRY
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜ LEVEL
🟨🟩⬜⬜🟩 DEFER
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 CEDAR

Let me start with a confession: I’m bad at puzzles. KenKen, cryptograms, Rubik’s Cubes, it doesn’t matter: They all make my head hurt. Crosswords boggle me; Boggle makes me cross. All told, I’ve left behind more half-finished puzzles than “Unsolved Mysteries.”

So when offered the chance to play and review today’s Wordle for fun — Ha! Fun! — I was wary. But then again, I also enjoy feeling sorry for myself, so I said yes.

I decided I’d start with some self-effacement, using the word MORON on line one. When I told this plan to Judy Tong, my editor, she chortled, noting that it was “the perfect moronic word to start with” as it has only one vowel and it appears twice.

Nonetheless, I was weirdly pleased when I got one letter — an R — right in the middle, but in the wrong spot. I knew I needed to bear down a little, though my next attempt, RETRY, was similarly flawed. Still, I got a green E in the second slot, and had narrowed the possibilities for my R.

Line three, however, was a disaster and one as old as journalism: a typo. I had meant to try LEVER — again, I’m not great at this — but mistyped and did LEVEL instead. My E was still green but the rest was as gray as this newspaper.

I started to panic: I wasn’t actually going to fail, was I? Why had I agreed to do this? Could I back out? Should I … wait … DEFER?

Bam! My fourth guess had saved me, getting me two green letters and a misplaced, yellow D. I pulled out a reporter’s pad and began gaming this out: The D couldn’t go anywhere but the middle — how many words end in “DR”? — leaving me with a cache of workable consonants, three vowels and only two letters to locate.

Still, I was stumped; my mind kept eddying back to high school Spanish: Could it be PEDIR? What about SEDER? No, two E’s again. Was BEDOR a word?

Then I saw the C. And just like that — and for the first time ever — I saw the answer.

Today’s word is CEDAR, a noun that, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is a coniferous pine tree with needlelike leaves and cones and fragrant, durable wood.

Today’s Statistics

Today’s puzzle is moderately easy.

The letter pattern in today’s word is unique enough that the answer can be found within six guesses, and the word is familiar, with no letter repeats.

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.”

Plum and Birch

Today’s Wordle Review: April 29, 2023

Today’s Statistics

Our Featured Artist

Further Reading