Wednesday for Wordlers and today’s Wordle word of the day is a bit of a tricky one, or at least it had me stumped for a spell.
The viral word puzzle game offers up a single word to solve each day. You can go try to solve it yourself at the game’s official website.
Wordle isn’t available on the App Store or Google Play, and it’s ad-free and entirely free-to-play at the moment, though all that could theoretically change when it migrates to its new owner, The New York Times.
For Wordle newbies, I have a helpful Wordle explainer piece which goes over the rules and history of the fledgling-but-viral puzzle game. I also have a tips & tricks guide to help you get the right guesses.
The game is pretty straightforward, but it’s just tricky enough to keep things interesting.
Today’s Wordle #235 Answer
Before we get to the answer . . . SPOILER WARNING! Don’t read any further if you don’t want hints or answers to today’s Wordle word of the day!
Okay, now for the hint: An important sense, even if it’s not one of the main five.
. . .
And the answer is . . . .
Kind of a roundabout way to arrive at the answer here. Oh well.
‘OPERA’ gave me very little to work with, and ‘ROOMY’ didn’t make matters much better. I had three correct letters but none of them were in the right spot and I floundered, uncertain how to arrange them.
I probably could have picked a better third guess—I knew that there was only one ‘O’ at this point!—but at least it got me the ‘O’ in a green box and I was pretty sure ‘R’ would finish things out.
My next guess was yet another screw-up, truth be told.
I’d basically settled on an idea at this point. The answer would probably end with ‘MOR’ and the only word I could think of that did that was ‘RUMOR’ and I spaced the fact that I’d already put the ‘R’ in the first spot back in my second guess. Clearly ‘RUMOR’ was going to be wrong.
Silver lining: I now had ‘UMOR’ and there just aren’t that many more letters to try out. I was going to guess ‘TUMOR’ if ‘HUMOR’ didn’t work, but it did! It’s not a tumor.
Etymology Notes From My Father
“Humor comes from a Latin word for moisture or fluid. At one point, you might have considered your basic disposition resulting from the interaction of the four humors: blood, phlegm, choler or melancholy. You’ve heard of people being phlegmatic? The result of the humor phlegm dominating, creating a sluggish fellow.
“But the more interesting thing for me today is the way that American spelling managed to come through. The Brits and Canadians, as you know, prefer humour. Given the way Wordle comes across the Atlantic, I’ve been wondering if the US spellings would get a chance. One wonders, I suppose, whether it’s a matter of that superfluous U sneaking into the British spellings or being squeezed out of the American ones.
“The good news for Wordlers is that honor and color and labor and favor and valor and vapor are all options when the Brits give up on that interposing U. Of course, it won’t help with the six-letter options: neighbour or flavour or parlour or smoulder. So where do all those extra U’s go when Americans drop them? They’re sucked up by nervous speakers, who punctuate their talks with endless Uh’s. Not to sound rancourous or anything.”
Thanks for reading, fellow Wordlers! Have a wonderful Wednesday!
You can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and support my work on Patreon. If you want, you can also sign up for my diabolical newsletter on Substack and subscribe to my YouTube channel.
