Like millions, I solve the Wordle challenge every day. It’s one minute out of my life that I don’t regret, though it can be vexing because (contrary to belief) Wordle has nothing to do with skill, beyond a few opening strategies.
For example, I always open with ‘AUDIO’ because it accounts for almost all the vowels. The next word (depending on my first-word hits) acquits the ‘E” and “T’ (the most common consonant in the English language), so maybe “THREW” or something. I usually puzzle it out on the third guess.
But today’s word illustrates how Wordle is just a guessing game, no matter what anybody says.
I almost jagged it in two with “MUSTY” but thereafter it became a crap-shoot — “FUSTY”, “GUSTY”, LUSTY”, “RUSTY”, “DUSTY” — not to mention my favourite!
The only thing that disqualified “BUSTY” as my next pick was how American prurience doesn’t translate to daily word-puzzles in the New York Times.
Trust me, you’ll never be riddling solutions to words containing the letters “-ENIS” or “-ULVA” either.
Cultural mores aside, there was nothing else in this universe to tip the odds in my favour today. Solving today’s Wordle became a roll of the (five-sided) dice which in no way is a measure of my amazeballs vocabulary.
Then there’s the problem of American-English.
This is not English-English, but rather an impatient mongrel which attacks the letter “U” on sight. This means some six-letter words are in contention, just because Americans can’t spell!
But you know me, I’ll labour on.
Yup, mesenchyme. I totally didn’t cheat.
If I’m feeling masochistic, I’ll visit visit wordlegame.org to humiliate myself with 10-letter wordles or the octordle (eight sex-letter wordles at once). Just to remind myself that English-English is my second language.
By the way, at wordlegame.org you can fix some of this by swapping between UK and US English. But where’s the AU English option? Miserly imperialists — WTF “Word not found” — we can’t have ‘didge’ but you get to ruin ‘twerk’?
And that’s apparently okay, you monsters.
That’s right. Mesenchyme. Look it up you ignorami.