Today’s Wordle Review

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 Simone Noronha. You can read more about her here.

★★★★★

Wordle 659 5/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ THOSE
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟨 SPAIN
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜ SNACK
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜ SNARL
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 SNAFU

At this point, for better or worse, Wordle has become the key I need to turn on the janky engine of my morning brain. When I fail to guess by the third or fourth attempt, flirting with a fifth, sixth or the abyss of age, it’s also a helpful jolt of adrenaline.

By the way, JANKY isn’t a bad Wordle solution, is it? It came to mind this time around.

My usual go-to first word isn’t ADIEU. I prefer THOSE — a solid baseline with three common consonants and two vowels.

This guess only gave me an S, so I tried SPAIN for the extra vowels, and because, well, I was in Europe, and now I had three letters that looked as if they maybe went together. With breakfast looming, I typed SNACK, and then figured SNARL should do the trick.

I was at five now, wondering if I could get away with writing a lame review that blamed jet lag for my failure to solve the puzzle. Was there some dreaded double letter I was missing? Or a U or Y? I started making up words, and thank God that saved me, because the answer is a made-up word from World War II that described my very predicament.

It means “Situation Normal: All Fouled Up,” though in common use, the F stands for a familiar expletive denoting chaos. I gather that Time magazine first published it in 1942, and it became the name of a popular wartime cartoon character (Private Snafu) who was an enlisted man who did everything wrong.

I appreciated the irony, so I gave the puzzle Dwight D. Eisenhower’s rank as general: five stars.

Today’s word is SNAFU. According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, it refers to a confused, mixed-up situation.

Today’s Statistics

Moderately challenging, mainly because of letter pattern, but the word may be unfamiliar to some:

This word has a unique ending that is hard to deduce, but its letters are common enough that the answer can be found using elimination strategies within six guesses.

Our Featured Artist

Simone Noronha is a South Asian illustrator and art director from Dubai who is based in New York. She enjoys weaving narratives and intricate details into her imagery with saturated palettes and the moody lighting that has become her signature. In an interview with Wired, she said, “I like to think of illustrative style as just our natural flaws shining through and doing the best with it.”

Further Reading

If you solved for a word different from what was featured today, please refresh your page.

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