Hey Wordle, That Didn’t Seem Fair

happiness, humor, lessons learned, passion, Teaching and Education 3 Minutes

Over the past month or so I have become mildly addicted to Wordle, and I realized I needed to play more than just one game a day.

So after a little bit of searching, I came across Wordle Unlimited. It’s the same exact game, except you can play it as many times as you want. And that is what I have been doing.

I still play the original version once each day, but Wordle Unlimited I play multiple times per day.

Here is a screenshot of my stats from a couple of days ago. As you can see, I am currently close to my best streak, so naturally, I want to break. In fact, my goal now is 100 straight wins, and each time I win a game, I start to feel a bit more nervous.

So here is the game I was working on the other day:

My start word is always the same: RATES. As you can see, that did not reveal much.

I got lucky with my second guess, BLEND, since now I had three of the five letters, even though none of them were in the correct place.

I was quite excited when I came up with the word UNDUE, thinking that may be it. Unfortunately, that was not the correct word, but at least now I knew where the letter E belonged.

At this point, I just wanted to figure out where the D and the N might go, hence the word, DANCE. That gave me where the N was.

Now I was starting to get nervous. I only had two guesses left, I only knew where two letters belonged, and I had a third letter.

Since desperate people do desperate things, I did something I rarely do. I used a word totally unrelated to the word I was trying to guess, but one I thought would tell me where the D was and maybe one or two of the other letters.

The word IDIOT seemed to be a good word to use. Now I knew where the D went, and I knew the O was either the first or second letter.

So the word was either ?ONDE or O?NDE.

In my mind, I ran through every possible letter as the mystery letter, and none of the words seemed familiar.

It was time once again for that desperate people thing because I wanted to keep the streak alive.

So I went out to the web and searched for words that had the words ONDE in it, and here is the list that came back:

Only two words ended with NDE, RONDE and MONDE. I had already used the letter R, so that left MONDE.

I had never heard of the word, but ti seemed like there was nothing else I could do. (I have been to Cafe du Monde in New Orleans, but I did not think of that as an English word, and if it was, it was not one I heard or saw in everyday usage.)

So I typed it in, very slowly, wondering the whole time if there was a simple word that I was just not seeing.

After I typed all five letters, I hit Enter, and here was the result:

I breathed a huge sigh of relief, my streak was still alive.

But I was also angry at Wordle Unlimited for using a word I would not describe as common, and I thought Wordle words were supposed to be common.

I did look it up, and it appears to be of French origin and means society or world.

So ultimately, no harm, no foul.

I just hope it’s not a sign that the game gets harder the longer one’s streak continues.

So that was a couple of days ago. I have since broken my 64 game winning streak, and am currently at 70 games in a row.

My nerves were on edge every time a game went past four guesses.

And while I am certainly hoping to get to 100 games in a row, I can’t imagine how nervous I’ll be while playing that big game.

I may need to do some breathing exercises before I start…

*image from WordleUnlimited

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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38 thoughts on “Hey Wordle, That Didn’t Seem Fair”

  5. I succumbed to the addiction after your post on Wordle. After awhile my son also showed me how I could play more than once a day and like you I have been. My thrill has been hitting on 2 twice (obviously you need some luck). I have been humbled that I rarely beat her in the NYT daily game. She has one 2 in limited games played.

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  6. I tried the original, and like you, was not happy with only one game a day. The other downside was not being able to talk to friends about it until they had finished the puzzle, since we all get the same word every day. The unlimited version sounds more appealing. You certainly have a flair for this, and your 100-game streak can’t be far off! Best of luck, Jim!

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  8. i love that you jumped right to the ‘idiot’ move, very smooth. i read that since the nyt took over wordle ,things have changed from common words to some that are more obscure and people are up in arms. i was tense just reading your process and your stats and have only done one wordle, under duress from my family wanting me to fit in. i’m sticking to my crosswords and sudoku puzzles. (and even jigsaw puzzles again once my young cat is not a crazy toddler anymore who knocks it down and hides the pieces).

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  10. Actually losing a game of wordle never occurred to me as a possibility, but I would have never gotten the word monde. I don’t know it as a word and I wouldn’t have looked it up. I would have been forced to walk away from the game unfinished. I have a phone app called Wordus that mimics the game. It started out stark and unadorned like wordle, but it has since been upgraded to add flashing colors and lots of advertisements… something I eventually expect to happen to wordle.

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    1. I’ve lost a couple, one of them was just bad guessing, and another one was because I thought the word was more of a proper noun, and thus did not guess it…

      I am guessing they are going to try and monetize it at some point…

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  13. I’ll stick to the one a day version as long as they stick to words in English – and preferably proper English, not the simplified version. I think you need therapy 🤣

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  15. My husband and I just tried to guess the word before we scrolled down lol it’s funny bc I generally always run through the same emotions for every game of wordle… like the 7 stages of grief (so-to-speak)… lol first I think I’m going to get it in one shot, then I think, no problemo I got lots more guesses and I will get it the next time, then 3rd line I get nervous that I am not getting it yet then 4th line I freak out thinking there’s a glitch in the game and IT’S NOT A REAL WORD and I start questioning the validity of the game LOL then I get it and I’m like, OH.. I need to read more LOL My husband plays nerdle and hellowordl…

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    1. 🙂
      you described perfectly the thoughts that run through my mind as I play Wordle!

      I tried Nerdle a couple of times – it seems quite challenging. I have not heard of hellowordl, butnow I have to give it a shot.

      I did reach my goal of 100 wins in a row, so I told myself when I did so, I would just go back to playing one game per day.

      But hellowordl doesn’t count 🙂

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