Wordle has become a daily ritual for many, with players eagerly sharing their streaks and bragging rights across social media. I’ve never been one to jump on the bandwagon. However, after seeing today's Wordle answer (#1,244, Thursday, November 14) trending on X, along with my colleagues talking about losing their streaks, I couldn’t help but be curious and have a go myself.
Why not right? To my surprise, I managed to guess what is said to be “one of the hardest words of 2024” in just four tries. And to be honest, there wasn’t much strategy involved. It was just pure luck. I’m definitely not claiming to be a Wordle expert, nor do I have any kind of mastery over words, because that’s certainly not the case.
If you’re stuck or just wondering how I got the answer in four guesses, here’s a rundown of what I did to get today’s tough word.
How I got today’s word on Wordle — spoiler alert
SPOILERS going forward because I will be revealing the answer!
Honestly, my first guess was a stroke of luck — it already gave me two yellow letters. I started with “plane” for no particular reason other than it had common letters and two vowels.
Once I had L and A, I decided to take a bit of a gamble with an uncommon word that most people probably wouldn’t think of for Wordle. Since I knew this answer was going to be tough, I went for something more daring — “dally” was my second guess. While it didn’t introduce any new letters, it did confirm that L was in the right spot and A wasn’t.
Feeling bold, I pushed the boundaries even further and focused on words with rarer letters, especially V and X. My colleague, Kaycee Hill, a fellow how-to writer at Tom’s Guide, suggested that using V might be a smart move. We went with “villa” next, which was actually risky considering the word didn't have double L's. But thankfully the guess was worth it, because it confirmed that the word did contain V, and that L and A belonged at the end.
That led me to the answer “uvula.” It’s not a word many people are familiar with, but I’d heard of it before (it’s the fleshy structure that hangs down at the back of your throat). Knowing this gave me somewhat of an advantage, and I was able to make the guess fairly quickly.
Again, I wasn’t calculating the odds like a Wordle wizard or using any advanced strategy — it was getting the right combination of letters in the right order at just the right time. I’m definitely not a Wordle master, but this little win felt like a fluke. In fact, I might start playing Wordle more often just for the fun of it.
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