I’m right there with you. I’ve got the middle three letters right after 3 guesses, but cannot even think of a word that fits what I’ve got left. At this point, I’m thinking it’s a word I don’t know, but that’s never happened yet, so maybe not. Grrrrr.
And I got it. Apparently I just needed to get up and walk around a bit to shake the answer loose.
Wordle 498 4/6*
Fun one!
Wordle 498 4/6*
Tricksy Wordle. Good word today. 
Wordle 498 3/6*
IRATE
SALTY
WALTZ
Wordle 498 5/6
CRISP
METAL
TALLY
BALUT
WALTZ
Oh thank God I finally saw it. There was no build up to it, I just all of a sudden could see it. I would have never guessed a common English word would end in TZ.
Wordle 498 5/6
Definitely not as easy as 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3
HEART
TASTY
CANTO
WAITS (I knew there was no S, just mining for letters
WALTZ
Wordle 498 3/6*
SPOUT
THIEF
WALTZ
Wordle 498 4/6
ROUTE
AMITY
SWATH
WALTZ
I was in @EllisDee’s shoes, just not for as long. I convinced myself that A had to be both the second and fifth letter. H and Y are gone. Nothing else makes sense! WANTA? WALTA? PAWTA? Nothing!
Took quite a while for that Z to drop.
Wordle 498 4/6
SLANT
CHORE
TALLY
WALTZ
Man, this one made me work. Had 3 letters right off the bat, but none of their positions. Came up with ~10 possibilities starting with one of those letters, and my usual second word was actually the best word I could think of to narrow those down, and it did. My third guess was one of the remaining possibilities from after the first guess, and it eliminated the other two as well.
So after the third guess, I knew the middle three letters, but given the letters I’d eliminated, it took me forever to get any word that would work at all. Fortunately, that word was the solution.
It was, for me, a sort of Sherlockian process: the answer, however improbable, must be correct.
The hard part is when, after you’ve eliminated the impossible, you don’t seem to have anything left, improbable or otherwise.
Trust me, this one gave me fits. I was in the exact same position you were, trying to fill the blanks in ALT, so I feel your pain.
Wordle 498 5/6* 10/30/2022
LIBEL → One and only one L. Got it.
CLOUT → And it’s not in second place, but there’s a T also…
APTLY → And an A - the only vowel there. Now, I should have seen by now that L must be in the middle, in which case I wouldn’t have wasted a guess on…
TRAWL → …but I did at least pick up the W. And I haven’t guessed an S yet! So - SALWT? STLAW? No. WALTS? Oh…
WALTZ
I was glad, in retrospect, to have avoided the ?ALT? trap, but it would have been nice to have had a shot at a 4. Also notable: no greens letters on the board before the winning guess.
That’s exactly how I saw it, too!
Wordle 498 5/6
AROSE
VAULT
LATCH
TALKY
WALTZ
With Y and H both eliminated as possible last letters, and (blank)ALT(blank) confirmed, it was a matter of going through the alphabet of non-eliminated letters for that fifth-position possibility. _ALTB? _ALTD? and so on…with I and Z looking like the only ones that could work. WALTZ seemed more likely than any borrow-word ending with _ALTI.
(I assume it would have had to be a borrow-word, maybe from Italian? Anyway, no likely candidate occurred to me.)
eta: funny, Discourse won’t let me put underscores (to represent missing letters) in front of AND in back of other letters.
I spent a really long time making up new words to hammer out a solve in 6
[spoiler]Balti is a word. It is a Indian stirfry curry/spoiler]
Wordle 498 6/6
cheat
party
fasts
balti
That’s the shortcut for italics text, like if you do asterisks instead it’s bold. You can force any character to be displayed literally instead of interpreted as a code by putting a forward slash \ in front of it.
“\_test\_” should display as _test_. Without the escape characters, “_test_” will appear as test.
Wordle 498 4/6
TRACE
HAUNT
PATTY
WALTZ
Had to rack my brain on this one after my 3rd word…I was stumped for the first time since I started playing. I went through every TI and TO ending word I could think of. Didn’t think it would be a plural word, as there never has been. Just wasn’t seeing it…until I finally did.
Not everyone. I was stumped too! Though, I did get it in 4 tries, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to solve this one for a bit there.
Wordle 499 4/6
CLAMP
PALER
APPLY
APTLY
Got me good on this one. I thought I had it with apply, but only because I was unable to check T like I normally would after hitting three yellows in the first guess.
Wordle 499 3/6
RATIO
METAL
APTLY
I don’t use word lists so I don’t know if there were other options after 2 but I had trouble thinking of any.
Wordle 499 4/6
EARTH
LIONS
DUMPY
APTLY