Today’s Wordle Review

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 658 3/6

⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ AUDIO⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩 HEDGE🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 LEDGE

My first thought when I was invited to write one of these Wordle Reviews was that there must have been some sort of misunderstanding. The email mentioned something about seeking “notable” reviewers and, at least outside of The Times’s newsroom, I’m not all that notable.

Inside the newsroom, my job is to manage a nimble team of multipurpose editors, so I assumed that the Games people had obviously sent me the wrong note and had instead meant to ask if my department could edit the Wordle Review. (As it turns out, they needed us to do that, too.) But apparently they really did want me — “a words guy,” they said — to review a Wordle. So, here we are.

Side note before I go on: I always play in hard mode. Though I won’t pass judgment on anyone else’s preference, normal mode still feels vaguely like cheating to me.

It was a no-brainer which word I would start with. I have a rotation of five or six starting words that I use, but my favorite, by far, is AUDIO.

Why AUDIO? Well, I like the idea of starting with a four-vowel word, but I’m a bit of a nonconformist, so I refuse to go with ADIEU. Never mind that AUDIO is almost as popular. More important in my early calculations was an article I read before The Times acquired Wordle, which noted that there were “no borrowed words” from other languages in the original solution list, ruling out ADIEU as a potential answer even if it’s accepted as a guess. Of course, now that Wordle has an editor, I suppose it’s possible ADIEU could show up someday, but it’s too late now because AUDIO has grown on me.

With AUDIO, I had the D correct in the third position, and had happily ruled out four vowels. A good start. At this point, I was reasonably confident that I was looking for a word with either two E’s or an E and a Y. I briefly considered TEDDY before casting it aside and moving on to more likely possibilities.

My mind went next to HEDGE, though I knew there were some rhymes out there and I risked getting exactly four letters right. In hard mode, finding four letters can occasionally be lethal if too many viable options for the fifth letter still exist. Imagine the answer is STOVE and you try STOLE while R, K and N are still in play. But today I could think of only two possible alternatives for HEDGE if I missed by just one letter, so I gave it a shot.

Indeed, I hit four letters exactly. And on that third line, with what I was pretty sure was a 50-50 chance, I guessed right.

That means today’s Wordle isn’t WEDGE, the other word I might have tried. It’s LEDGE, which is, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, “a shelflike projection” or “a projecting ridge of rocks.”

Today’s Statistics

This word is moderately challenging because of letter repetition and uncertainty.

The word contains a common letter pattern with five or six possible answers. Getting the answer in six guesses requires making strategic choices with every guess.

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.”

Further Reading

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