Today’s Wordle #520 Hints, Clues And Answer For Monday, November 21st

Wordle remains remarkably resilient as one of the most-played, most-talked about buzzy little games of 2022. I wonder what’s in store for 2023? Will Wordle retain its popularity or will some other viral sensation swoop in and steal its thunder?

Getting that viral concoction is like trapping lightning in a bottle. I’ve seen a few other games get this level of buzz, but not many. Pokémon GO took off like a bat out of hell back in 2016, with levels of hype few mobile games have achieved before or since. Everyone was talking about that game, including plenty of people who had never played Pokémon before (in any of its iterations). It didn’t click with me, though. When I’m outside walking around, I want to be outside. In nature or wherever I am, not on my phone. Not in some ‘augmented reality’ app, that’s for sure.

Fortnite grew into something just about everyone was talking for a while, and I definitely got into that one, though I was never very good at building—you can build and edit structures on the fly in the popular battle royale game—and soon moved on to greener pastures. Wordle is more accessible than either of those games, requiring very little time and no hand-eye coordination. Just a reasonably decent vocabulary and a penchant for puzzles.

Speaking of which, let’s do today’s word shall we?

Today’s Wordle Solution (Spoilers Ahead!)

The Hint: The sun rises in the East. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

The Clue: There are more vowels than consonants in this word.

The Answer:

Well well well, this is a tricky word if ever there was one! My guessing game started off unlucky and then swiftly a turn in the other direction, though it still took me four tries to guess the answer.

Crash was inspired by my time playing Warzone 2 recently. As much as I really do love the game, the frequency of crashes is starting to become infuriating at this point. Alas, crash did not treat me particularly well, leaving me stranded with 349 remaining words.

I decided to try out the only letter I got right—a yellow ‘A’—in the first box. I find that so many words have ‘A’ in the middle box or the first box that trying that next just made sense. I considered alone and alive but finally settled on aglow, which turned out to be rather nifty—nabbing me not just the green ‘A’ but a green ‘O’ too.

From here I thought of all the words it could be. At first I could only think of a couple: annoy and afoot, but I figured there were probably more. I figured I’d try a word that had some of those letters to narrow it down…so what had ‘N’ and ‘Y’ and ‘F’ and ‘T’. Nifty! Oddly enough, none of those letters were right . . . but I got a third vowel in yellow. Now I was truly puzzled, and I admit to having to think for some time before plopping the ‘X’ in there and guessing axiom.

According to Wordle Bot, before I guessed nifty there was another possible word that would have stumped me even more if I didn’t eliminated that ‘N’: axion, which is apparently a “hypothetical elementary particle postulated by the Peccei–Quinn theory in 1977 to resolve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics.” Oh, and abbot, though that’s far less obscure.

In any case, I tied Wordle Bot today. Huzzah!