Today’s Wordle Review: May 15, 2023

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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 Colin Laurel. You can read more about him here.

★★★★

Wordle 695 4/6

⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩 STARE
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 BADGE
⬜🟩🟩🟨🟩 LANCE
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 CANOE

Everyone knows that the best starting word is ADIEU. It gets all of the vowels out of the way, except for O, but most people correctly regard O as the worst and the weakest of the vowels, the runt of that particular litter. None of the other vowels look like a number. O is the only letter having an identity crisis. Apart from I, maybe.

But starting with ADIEU has always struck me as quite cheap. Cynical, really. It has become orthodoxy that it is the smart way to start, but if anything it’s the opposite: conclusive proof that you lifted your strategy from an advice blog or adopted it on the recommendation of a commenter or, worse, someone who shares their Wordle on Twitter.

I don’t know what company policy is on this — I’m probably meant to tell you to share your solution far and wide — but I never felt compelled to tell people how quickly I had solved Wordle, or how long my streak was. Not everything has to be comparative. It is, at times, nice to keep things private, to have something that is just for you.

(The exception to this was my wife, who started playing a little after me. We used to compare notes, right up until the point that I worked out that she was delaying her daily attempts until after she had interrogated me for clues, thus artificially improving her own performance. Her cunning is among her many admirable traits, but I did not wish to be her patsy.)

So I started, as I always do, with STARE. The word is a pretty common first choice, but I landed on it organically. I ended up with one yellow and one green. Reasonable. BADGE was a way of establishing whether the A was the first or second letter. LANCE, as in Armstrong or boil, seemed unlikely, but it carried me over the hill. A brief scan of the remaining letters revealed only one option: CANOE. I was missing an O. No wonder I had overlooked it. I thought it was a number.

Today’s word is CANOE, a noun. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to a narrow, light boat with pointed ends.

Today’s Statistics

Today’s puzzle is moderately easy.

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

Wordle Wrap-Up

Wordle 688 Monday, May 8: AGLOW

Wordle 689 Tuesday, May 9: COCOA

Wordle 690 Wednesday, May 10: ETHIC

Wordle 691 Thursday, May 11: BROOM

Wordle 692 Friday, May 12: SNACK

Wordle 693 Saturday, May 13: ACRID

Wordle 694 Sunday, May 14: SCARF

Our Featured Artist

Colin Laurel is a Black illustrator with an affinity for bold line work and joyous expression. He uses his identity as a lens through which to provide healing imagery to queer and marginalized communities, and he has referred to his art as a form of self-care. Mr. Laurel is influenced by vintage movie posters, production art, video games, music and mythology. With each piece, he hopes to convey humanity’s relationship with the beauty of nature.

Plum and Birch

Today’s Wordle Review: May 15, 2023

Today’s Statistics

Wordle Wrap-Up

Our Featured Artist

Further Reading