It’s Monday, for better or worse, and it’s also surprisingly late in the month. There’s just one week of February left! How does time fly by this fast?
Honestly, I don’t think it’s just because we’re having fun. There’s plenty of struggle and grind in the daily routine. But it doesn’t hurt to have a daily Wordle to solve.
Today’s Wordle answer isn’t actually that tough—but it still took me five guesses, even with what I consider pretty good words for the first four.
Wordle remains the hit viral puzzle game sensation of 2022. Josh Wardle’s little game was sold to the New York Times but remains the same great, elegant, ad-free little puzzle game as before—minus a few bad words.
Today’s Wordle #247 Answer
As always, prior to treading forth I must warn you: Spoilers lay in wait, their spoilery tentacles poised to descend upon you and ruin your otherwise perfectly good day.
Now that you’ve been warned, a hint for today’s Wordle: The books and the show diverged when it came to these Game of Thrones villains.
And the answer is . . . .
This isn’t the toughest word out there, but it still took me five guesses. That’s mainly because even with a few letters (in the wrong spot) there were so many options to choose from.
PIQUE was something I came up with earlier as a weirdly random starting word that included three vowels. Interestingly, it took me two more guesses to get the second vowel—an ‘O’—and at this point I had four correct letters with the ‘T’ in the right spot.
Why I thought of OTTER before OTHER is simple: I love otters. They’re friggin’ adorable. I want to die and be reincarnated as a playful otter and swim and frolic with fellow otters in the sea and/or rivers. Otters rock.
Anyways, the right word was the other word, not the otter word, so I’ll stop waxing poetic about otters, adorable and delightful though they may be.
Etymology Notes From My Father (The Other Kain)
“The word other comes from an Old English word with connections to an Indo-European base meaning “the other of two.” It’s interesting, then, how the use of the word stretches over two vastly different perspectives. You have other, as in where’s my other glove, my other sock, my other shoe? Who took the other set of keys? In these examples, other is describing a very similar (or identical) thing as part of a pair.
“But in the other sense, we use other to emphasize difference. Think of the other party (those idiots!) or the other language (which is naturally inferior to ours, right?) People have even turned it into a verb to mark differences: othering is a means of dismissing a different cultural perspective.
“In literature, one of the great other examples is in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s the dignified, rational identity of the scientist, paired with the other self, a brutal manifestation of evil. One of my favorite others in literature is in Mark Twain’s excellent “Encounter with an Interviewer.” Twain’s sardonic interviewee tells a naïve reporter how he and his twin brother, Bill, were in a bath at two weeks old, and one of them was drowned. The mystery of his life, as he explains to the interviewer, is that they got mixed up. One child had a large mole on his hand, while the other didn’t. “That was me,” he said. “That child that was the one that was drowned!” They buried the other child, but the interviewee asks the reporter not to tell his family about the mistake. “Heaven knows they have heart-breaking troubles enough without adding this.””
Hope the start of your week is every bit as awesome as the start of an otter’s week, oh my Wordlers! Be well!
Further Wordle-Related Reading:
- Newcomers to the game, be sure to read over my Wordle primer. I go over the game’s rules, history and so forth.
- Next, check out my Wordle Tips & Tricks guide for some helpful advice on how to puzzle through each day’s guesses.
- Finally, be sure to bookmark my Wordle alternatives piece for some other fun games to keep you occupied after each daily word is done. (And check out Globle while you’re at it if you want to hone your geography skills).
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