Today’s Wordle #500 Hint, Clues And Answer For Tuesday, November 1st

It’s November! I hope everyone had a fun Halloween. We’re now officially in the final stretch of 2022, racing toward Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the Christmas season. Soon bells will be jingling and people will be drinking mugs of eggnog and smooching under mistletoe and all that jazz.

I can’t wait. I love Christmas. I don’t love Christmas presents or the commercialization of Christmas in general—“buy stuff for people” is never as compelling as “spend quality time with loved ones” in my book, though I think it’s fun for kids—but I do love the season. The lights, the music, the customs, the celebration, the snow.

But we’re not there yet. Autumn is only halfway over, though we’ve likely passed peak leaf season.

I talk about the passage of time and the shift of seasons in this space quite a bit, so I thought I’d share this neat calendar from the fantasy novel The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman:

As I note in the tweet above, I’d really like to adopt this calendar for a bit and see what it’s like. I dig the idea of five seasons, each broken into two 36-day months. Our seasons never being or end at the start of a month, so part of December is Fall and part is Winter. Winter ends and Spring begins in March and so forth. In this fantasy calendar, each season is exactly two months long. Each is 72 days.

And Gloaming divides Fall and Winter, which seems appropriate since in many ways the time between late October and late December feels not so much like either season, but some middle ground. Gloaming, of course, means ‘twilight’ or ‘dusk’ which is apt enough.

In any case, food for thought. Let’s do this Wordle!

Today’s Wordle Solution (with Spoilers!)

The Hint: A lovely natural smell.

The Clue: This word ends with a vowel sound.

The Answer:

I feel pretty good about this one. I know I’ve used adieu before and I’m always going on about how you should use a different starting word every day, but I just felt like knocking out all those vowels and this was the first vowel-y word I could conjure.

It paid off with a yellow ‘I’ and a green ‘E’ but I still had to worry about the ‘O’ and knock out some consonants. Plonk did the trick, slashing 118 options down to just 2. With a green ‘P’ and a green ‘E’ and two yellow letters, I didn’t have a very hard time coming up with piney. I didn’t even consider pines because I never go with plural words when I’m going for my final answer.

Luckily enough, piney did the trick. I do love that smell. It reminds me of going to our family cabin in Montana. The scent of pine in the air so thick you can almost taste it. There’s a fresh bite to that smell that makes me think of alpine escapes, high mountain clambering and wide vistas. Quite lovely all around.

Happy November, folks. Oh, and happy 500th Wordle!

Play today’s Wordle over at The New York Times. See your Wordle Bot analysis right here.