Today’s Wordle Review: May 6, 2023

Welcome to The Wordle Review. Be warned: This article contains spoilers for today’s puzzle. Solve Wordle first, or scroll at your own risk.

This month’s featured artist is Colin Laurel. You can read more about him here.

★★★★

Wordle 686 4/6

⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜ STEAK
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 CHOIR
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜ GUNDY
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ANGER

I must admit to taking the easy way out on this Wordle. The pressure of doing the puzzle in front of the world stopped me from taking the kind of risks I might take on another day. Typically the only consequence of my not getting the word is silent ridicule from my husband, Chris, who apparently had heard of the word BORAX before April 12.

I play Wordle every morning before rolling out of bed, and if it’s a Monday or Tuesday, solving the crossword also becomes part of my morning routine because I know I can solve it quickly.

Each day, I start Wordle with STEAK. If one or two of the letters hit, as they did today, then I usually follow up with a word that includes those letters.

To maximize my chance of finding the other three letters in the puzzle, I went with a word that has no letters in common with STEAK: CHOIR. For my third guess, I tried a new set of letters: GUNDY. Please do not ask me to define it, because I cannot. But Wordle accepts it as a word, and so do I

For me, STEAK-CHOIR-GUNDY is much less risky than following STEAK with a word that puts the E and A in other places and uses other consonants. Between STEAK, CHOIR and GUNDY, I had used all the letters in today’s word, which I guessed in four tries. Four guesses are pretty standard for me, but words that start with vowels, even simple ones like today’s, have been known to stump me. So while I feel as if the STEAK-CHOIR-GUNDY route was a bit of a Wordle hack, it also might have saved me from some Wordle-induced ANGER at myself.

Today’s word is ANGER, a noun and a verb. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to a feeling of disappointment along with a desire to fight back at the “supposed cause” of the emotion.

Today’s Statistics

Today’s puzzle is moderately challenging because of uncertainty.

The word has a common letter pattern with five or six possible answers. Getting the answer in six guesses requires strategic choices at every turn.

Our Featured Artist

Colin Laurel is a Black illustrator with an affinity for bold line work and joyous expression. He uses his identity as a lens through which to provide healing imagery to queer and marginalized communities, and he has referred to his art as a form of self-care. Mr. Laurel is influenced by vintage movie posters, production art, video games, music and mythology. With each piece, he hopes to convey humanity’s relationship with the beauty of nature.