Today’s Wordle Review: May 18, 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 698 4/6

🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜ ROAST
🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜ SWORE
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜ SHORL
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 SHORN

As a child, my dad and his dad tried to get their dog to say “roast”: an impossible goal, but one they thought was utterly hysterical. Surely, if a dog could say “ruff,” it could eventually find its way to saying “roast,” the meat my grandma pulled out of the oven on occasion.

The dog never said “roast.” But boy, does my dad still get mileage out of that joke, so I often find that story bouncing around in my head, and the word ROAST is frequently my first guess when playing WORDLE.

Is it the best first word? Not necessarily. But I get a few good letters out of the way. The R, O and S were yellow. A fairly good go! I immediately went back to my old ways, typing in a word that is not a word. (I know SCROLL has two L’s, but maybe “SCROL” is a word too?! You can see I’m not a regular player of word games.)

I landed on SWORE for my second word, and let out an audible “woo-hoo!” when the yellow letters turned green. I had S, O and R. I was so very close to trying STORY or SPORT before remembering that the word I’m after does not have a T. S’MORE? No E. SCORE? C’mon now, I know there’s no E. SNORE? SNORT? No E, no T!

I become convinced that SNORY is a word. It is not. Neither is SHORP. I can guarantee you I knew this already, but I often find myself needing to test my knowledge. My partner is humiliated by this strategy, sometimes looking over my shoulder to ask me to “use that word in a sentence” as I hit “enter.”

My Wordle strategy is a bit unhinged, and I can only imagine how ashamed WordleBot must be of me.

Occasionally, though, I get lucky! SHORL is a word! One that, admittedly, I did not know. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it is an alternate spelling of “schorl,” which is a black variety of tourmaline. Let’s take that one step further: A tourmaline, in addition to being the name of the beach where I learned to surf in San Diego, is a very hard, piezoelectric, rhombohedral mineral, of various colors, used as a gem and in making pressure gauges.

I now have SHOR. And then the answer hits me.

I solved the Wordle in four guesses. I give the puzzle four out of five stars, with one of those stars going to the unexpected education on minerals this puzzle gave me.

Today’s word is SHORN. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it’s a verb, the past tense of shear.

Today’s Statistics

Today’s word is moderately challenging because of uncertainty.

The word has a common letter pattern with five or six possible answers. Getting the word in six guesses requires strategic choices at every attempt.

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 18, 2023

Today’s Statistics

Our Featured Artist

Further Reading