for when you only slightly want to cheat.
You see, playing games is fun. I won’t criticise how you play Wordle, Solitaire, or any other game in which cheating isn’t even a possibility. You can reach the conclusion however you want if you’re playing for yourself. And perhaps that means you occasionally want a clue.
If you want just a tiny tip but don’t want the entire thing to be revealed, Wordle is a hard one. If you were solving a crossword puzzle, you could look up a few of the clues online and use your wits to figure out the rest. However, Wordle is actually only one word with five letters, and you either know it or you don’t. If you’re fortunate enough to have a buddy who solves it before you, you may ask them to tell you what letter the word begins with or to offer you a tip about what it means in general. (After making a few guesses one day, I finally guessed correctly—the word was ULCER—after seeing a tweet that included both Wordle and stomach issues.)
What if, though, you don’t have a friend to crib from? It turns out that there is a simpler method: look at Google News.
A select few websites regularly post Wordle hints and solutions. One in particular, Try Hard Guides, clearly targets people who are looking in the middle of a puzzle by including lots of tips in its headlines. Things like “5 Letter Words Starting With ST and Ending With G,” or “5 Letter Words With OAS in the Middle.” (These, of course, refer to many puzzles.) If you know there is a G in it someplace, stopping there might help you identify it without having to make a second guess.
Check out the Wordle page for Try Hard Guides to get right to the source; it appears that a new spoiler-free tip article is posted there every day. Other resources for hints include Express.co.uk and Gfinity Esports (which provides hints about the definition of the word of the day) (which tells you the starting letter and the number of vowels).
Better better, check out the solver tool on Try Hard if you need more specialised assistance. For any Wordle puzzle, you can enter your yellow and green letters to get a list of options and suggested guesses.
If you want something more ambiguous, I recommend using the Scrabble Word Finder, which lets you enter up to two question marks to represent mystery letters along with up to two letters you know are in the word. It helps when you know three of the letters but are unsure of their exact placement. You will encounter many strange Scrabble words because it is not tuned to Wordle’s dictionary. It still feels like a puzzle to me because of the additional labour, kind of like when you’re playing a video game and have to complete a side quest to get a key to unlock a closed door.
