Wordle 551 4/6*
BRING
ADEPT
EVOKE
EXCEL
Well, I was overdue for a six. (Yeah, yeah, that’s it! Overdue!)
Wordle 551 6/6*
IRATE
FLESH
BELOW
KUGEL
EXPEL
EXCEL
Not sure I could have made that any harder. Phew, indeed.
Wordle 551 5/6
RADIO
FLUTE
BELLY
WHEEL
EXCEL
Truth. This game sure can keep one humble.
I really thought that either the double L or the terminal Y would pay off. Nope.
Then, while I was right about two E’s, I was wrong to put them together.
I just kept thinking in the wrong direction here. Tough one.
Wordle 551 4/6* 12/22/2022
LUNAR → Not much of a start.
SLOTH → Or a second. Three spots left for the L, eight other letters gone.
PILED → Ends in -EL. Probably two Es. BEVEL, or…
EXCEL
Though I should have also thought of BEZEL, in which case I would have ended up with a 5 for having to try one of the B- words first. So sometimes having an incomplete enumeration of possible guesses can help.
Wordle 552 4/6*
STARE
RATIO
GROAT
AORTA
Was reluctant to use GROAT, too obscure. Turns out answer was even more obscure IMO
Apparently you are ahead of a lot of people. It may be beneficial to let everyone know that you are on “tomorrow’s word” - Friday’s word. People may assume that the spoiler is for today’s word.
Seconding @Author_Balk. I clicked on the blur without even thinking about it. I’m going to try and forget what I saw between now and morning, but it ain’t easy.
Maybe it should be suggested to the NYT that there should be a single time worldwide when each day’s new Wordle pops up. I really don’t care what time - nothing wrong with midnight GMT, for instance - but the real problem here is that different people around the world gain access to a given day’s Wordle at very different times.
Wordle 551 4/6
STERN
GUILE
LEVEL
EXCEL
LEVEL, with two repeated letters, would often be a bad guess as it wouldn’t give as much information as would a five-different-letters word–but I got lucky here.
Wordle 552 4/6
RATIO
ARGOT
ABORT
AORTA
This was much harder than it should have been. I kept coming up with words I didn’t think were appropriate for Wordle. I was pretty sure GROAT and ABORT weren’t good guesses and it didn’t accept ASTRO, but I was blocked on the AO start.
Wordle 551 4/6
FOAMY
GRIPE
BENCH
EXCEL
Wordle 552 4/6
CRISP
LATER
QUART
AORTA
Took a very long time to see aorta. So while I may now be on a 4 streak, at least I’m also on an only-yellow streak.
(I don’t want to admit how long I stared at _ORTA before thinking of putting a vowel in the front.)
I was thinking the same thing. I thought it was a known term, outside of this board, but apparently not. I like the term for those types of words, and like everyone else, I abhor them, though trap words do provide a good challenge, as frustrating as they can be.
@Author_Balk Thanks for providing the link to that interview, it was a good interview.
One thing I caught during that interview that I found interesting (in a funny way)…one of the interviewers made reference to an astronaut, Al Worden, who was isolated orbiting the moon for three days by himself, and the next day’s word was LUNAR. I played that game before I listened to the interview, though I would not have thought of that, but I was thinking it was a bit of a “precognitive hint” for the answer to the next day’s Wordle. 
Wordle 552 3/6
TRANS
LOUIE
AORTA
Wordle 552 2/6
EARTH
AORTA
Two woo-hoo!!
Wordle 552 3/6*
QUALM
APRON
AORTA
I was thinking the O had to go at the end because really how many words start AO, except maybe AORTA - AORTA!!!
Wordle 552 3/6
Another 3.
CRANE
PARTY - RT in spots 3 and 4. And A at the beginning or end
AORTA - or both beginning and end
Wordle 552 ?/6
I saw the answer yesterday. Because I’m like that, I went ahead and tried to simulate how I would have played it if I hadn’t known the answer.
I started the same as I would have done anyway:
SLANT
CHORE
So far, so good. There are fifty ways to leave your lover arrange those four letters and one blank without putting a letter in an excluded location. As best as I could tell, only three of them result in words that don’t use any of the six excluded letters: AORT_ (first in alpha order, treating blanks as the 27th letter of the alphabet), RAT_O a good ways later, and _ATOR nearer to the end, yielding AORTA, RATIO, and GATOR.
I mentally downweighted GATOR as slang, and literally flipped a coin between the other two. It came up AORTA’s way, so that’s how I played it on the NYT. Would I have done that if I hadn’t known the answer, or would I have gone with RATIO anyway because I like the word better? Can’t really say. Really wish I could have scored this as a 3.5.
Wordle 552 4/6
RAISE
BOARD
MORAL
AORTA
Wordle 552 4/6*
UNCLE
SHARD
RATIO
AORTA
Wordle 552 4/6
HEART
STRAP
TARRY
AORTA You’d think given my starting word it would have come to me sooner