Today’s Wordle #517 Hints, Clues And Answer For Friday, November 18th

It’s that time again. Time to solve a Wordle before the world ends. Remember the whole “save the cheerleader, save the world” thing from Heroes? Well this is like that. Solve a Wordle, save the world. Only unlike Heroes, I’m determined not to start sucking after Season 1.

That’s a curious idea. What if Wordle had seasons kind of like some other games do (Fortnite and other ‘live-service’ games). They could be themed or include some kind of reward system. You could buy a Wordle Pass for ten bucks and unlock special Wordle cosmetics!

If that all sounds mildly dystopian, yeah, it’s supposed to. But crazier ideas have been floated for game revenue in the past. Just look at the state of mobile gaming! They literally break their games before letting you play them for free and then charge you to make them work in a way that’s actually fun and functional. It’s gross! I can barely play mobile games anymore because of the greed and nonsense that goes on in that industry.

So yeah, let’s save the world instead.

Today’s Wordle Solution (With Spoilers!)

The Hint: Similar to a rune or a sigil.

The Clue: There are the fewest possible vowels imaginable in this word.

The Answer:

Well now, this is a tough Wordle! About as tough as they come if you ask me (though I’m not sure if that’s thanks to The New York Times’s new Wordle editor or not).

I was going for descriptive, evocative words with my guesses today. Chime is a very noisy word, but not noisy in a bad way. A clock chiming can be quite beautiful—or quite ominous depending on the circumstances. (Disenchanted, the sequel to Enchanted, lands on Disney+ today and has me thinking about such things).

Alas for me, chime only got me a yellow ‘H’ and ruled out a couple vowels. So I picked a word that had two totally different vowels but still has an ‘H’: hound, as in You ain’t nothing but a hound dog or The Hound Of The Baskervilles or:

Chime actually took my possible options down to just 84, which isn’t half bad, and hound slashed that number even smaller to just 17 (thanks Sandor Clegane!) but that’s still quite a few to choose from. With just one vowel left, and the ‘H’ still in yellow, I made a brash guess. Well, I guessed brash anyways, which ended up being as good a guess as any. My ‘H’ was now in green, but I had no other letters. I’d eliminated 12 letters already including—puzzlingly—all five vowels. With only ‘Y’ to glue things together, I admit I was quite puzzled at this point. Y, after all, is often at the end of words like pointy or sorry or dusty and so forth. Where would it go here?

Well, I assumed it would have to go in the middle, since it was the only vowel (or vowel-hybrid?) letter remaining. The arduous task of going letter to letter began and finally I came to my answer: glyph.

I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes. I saw the glyph. Huzzah and hooray!

Wordle Bot and I tied on this one. He got to glyph by way of slate / cumin / flood / glyph—all very evocative words as well, other than slate which is just basic and boring at this point. Basic and boring like my enemy, Wordle Bot . . . .