Today’s ‘Wordle’ Answer #245: Saturday, February 19th Solution

Saturday’s Wordle is yet another tricky one, though this isn’t because The New York Times has somehow made the game harder.

Note: Skip below for the answer. I’m about to go on a bit of a Wordle rant.

A Wordle Hurdle?

I was, ahem, quite puzzled when I read this column in The Guardian with the catchy headline: “My five-letter reaction to the New York Times taking over Wordle? I quit.”

Catchy, sure, but columnist Emma Brockes makes very peculiar arguments that I’m not sure add up. The gist of the column is that Brockes no longer trusts the ‘puzzle master’ (now the NYTs) though why this is I’m having a bit of a harder time parsing.

For instance, she writes that “after a week of scandalous decisions by the NYT, the puzzle’s new owners, it’s only a matter of time” before she quits the game. These “scandalous decisions”?

Removing some words from the game’s possible guess and answer lists—primarily bad words that the paper of record simply doesn’t want in its games. This led, of course, to the AGORA/AROMA ‘scandal’ though Brockes chocks that up to “an administrative error” which is hardly much of a scandal.

Brockes also implies, vaguely, that the game is getting harder due to new management. “I have given much thought as to whether, under new management, the words are getting harder” she writes, but we know that this isn’t the case. The New York Times hasn’t added any harder words at all—again, only having removed some they find either inappropriate or too obscure (or perhaps, not English enough, like Agora).

Brockes calls the NYTs the “effortless ruiner of all things” but only explains this accusation in the most obscure terms. “The main thing is the choice of words,” she writes, despite the fact that the words remain generated by the very same game as before. She’s not sure the game is getting harder—and references ‘tapir’ as an example of a very challenging pre-acquisition word—but “there is something different about Wordle now it’s under Big Puzzle management.”

So what is it about this Big Puzzle management that’s so bothersome?

Brockes explains: “On Wednesday, I got “caulk” – a word I associate with “spackle” and is annoyingly obscure – but this morning, for the first time, I bombed out and didn’t get the word. This wasn’t because it was hard, but because it was easy and I’d wasted two tries on obscure words that I thought were more likely to come out of the NYT’s puzzle desk.”

But but but! These words are not coming out of the NYT’s puzzle desk. They are the same words from the same list, minus a few naughtier ones. There isn’t some mustache-twirling NYTs puzzle editor-at-large sneaking in the word ‘shake’ just to confuse columnists.

If you’d like to see what’s new with Wordle under new management, I go over the details here. Read on for today’s solution and hint.

Today’s Wordle Answer #245

As always, before we go any further I must offer up a warning: There be spoilers here! Yargh! Spoilers ahead, ye landlubbers!

And, of course, a hint: Only a pig would gulp in such fashion.

And the answer is . . .

**drumroll**

I feel like I got both very lucky with this one from my very first guess and also kind of unlucky with my last few. ‘SWILL’ is one of those words that lines up with a lot of other very similar words—like SKILL and SHILL. The only reason I didn’t guess SPILL was because the ‘P’ had been eliminated in ‘SPOIL.’ The only reason I didn’t guess STILL was thanks to SLATE.

So it all worked out pretty well, but this could have gone worse given how much less common SWILL is than most of the words it shares its 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th letters with.

One strategy, when confronted with a word with so many options in one of the letter slots—if you still have a couple guesses—is to try to come up with a word you know is wrong, but includes a few different possibilities. So to see if the missing letter is T, K or H you could guess ‘THINK’ for instance.

In any case, hope you’re having a lovely weekend!

Further Wordle-Related Reading:

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