Wordle 965 5/6
HEART
STOIC
STINK
STILL
STIFF
Wordle 965 4/6
CRANE
POISE
STILL
STIFF
Wordle 965 4/6* 2/9/2024
PLACE → Wow. Complete whiff. Second try on the way, and I think I’ll make it two vowels and three comcons
ROIST → Great second guess. STI?? looks to be the next guess, I’ll try a nod to Tolkien with an N and another consonant
STING → What consonants remain? STICK is out, ditto STINT. I guess it’s a good time to try a double letter
STIFF
SMITH was still out there. Scoredle had 24 guesses left after my first two, but a lot of them were plurals.
Wordle 965 5/6
ACUTE
INTRO
TIMID
STILT
STIFF
What a slog that was!
Wordle 965 5/6*
LEAST
STUMP
STOOP <— oops
STINT
STIFF
This is more like it.
Wordle 965 3/6*
IRATE
FOIST
STIFF
I got lucky with finding the ‘F’ on the second go. It left only one word to play. 
Wordle 965 3/6*
TROPE
STAIN
STIFF
Wordle 965 3/6
SLATE
CHOIR
STIFF
Saturday, February 10th
Wordle 966 3/6
PLANT
SCORE
FRIED
Results after 2 were much too familiar, so I did a thread search on my posts in this thread where I posted “score” sorted by latest. I last had this exact opening January 28th. I wrote a whole long description about how I spent all day coming up with around 20 possible solutions and analyzing the best word to use at 3, which ended up being fried. Answer was ember, I got a 4.
But I also had this same opening January 11th, where I wrote a whole long description about how I used to like these types of wordles but didn’t like them anymore because it was too much work. And again on the 11th I used fried as word 3 and then solved at 4 with brief. Oddly, I didn’t remember this one at all on the 28th. I guess having it happen twice in the past month finally made it stick in my memory.
Made this a no-brainer of just going straight for fried without doing any analysis at all. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the answer!
Wordle 966 4/6
RATIO
LINER
GRIEF
FRIED
[spoiler]Wordle 966 3/6
[/spoiler]
RACED
MIRED
FRIED
Wordle 966 5/6
STERN
CLOUD — could be aired armed dared dried fired fried hired mired pried raged raked raved razed redid riped wired
GIMPY — could be dried fried hired redid
DRIED
FRIED
Wordle 966 3/6*
\begin{aligned} &\bbox[silver,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt B} \bbox[yellow,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt E} \bbox[silver,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt A} \bbox[yellow,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt R} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt D} \\ &\bbox[silver,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt T} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt R} \bbox[yellow,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt E} \bbox[silver,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt N} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt D} \\ &\bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt F} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt R} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt I} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt E} \bbox[lime,5px,border:1px solid black]{\texttt D} \\ \end{aligned}
Wordle 966 5/6
1,713
176
11
3
SLANT
CHORE
GRIMY
BIPED
FRIED
Up until now, Wordle has abstained from -ED suffixes. It may not have been a stated rule, but the complete absence of those suffixes was too unlikely to be a matter of chance. It had to have been an implicit rule, and now it’s been broken.
Because of that long abstention, after 3 I was down to words with -ER suffixes, which we’d had before: RUDER, SURER, and of course the infamous PARER. In this case, I was choosing between DRIER, FRIER, PRIER, and also an alternate spelling of ‘briar’ as BRIER. So I went with BIPED on 4 as a sleuth word, with the D there to get DRIER in or out, and instead, to my complete surprise, it got me the -ED suffix. So at 5 I was guessing between FRIED and DRIED; at least I guessed right and avoided the 6.
Wordle 966 4/6*
ALONE
TRIES
GRIEF
FRIED
Wordle 966 4/6
RAISE
WEIRD
CLIPT
FRIED
Yep, and that’s going to bring dozens of new words and a lot more traps into consideration.
The rule is is that words that are created past tense by adding ED aren’t on the original answer list. Cried, dried, fried and tried are not made past tense by adding ED. They first change the vowel from Y to I and then add ED, making them non-standard. Thus they appeared on the original answer list before the New York Times bought it.
I’m not defending this, but I did notice this rule when I did my analysis last year to figure out my ideal starting word. (When I switched from clamp to plant.)
I believe I also posted this in the thread, though obviously I wouldn’t expect people study my every word. I’m just saying that this is not evidence of any change in the basic guidelines, and that you shouldn’t expect a flood of past tense ED words to start appearing as answers.
EDIT: I misremembered. It wasn’t when I did my analysis, it was when quordle had a past tense answer that annoyed me. You have to expand the details box in the linked post below:
The next few posts after the linked post are also worth reading.
That’s one funny place to draw the line, IMHO. If the rest of the word stays the same when adding ED, that’s no good, but it’s OK if you change a final Y to I when you add the ED. Just a special case of the same basic rule of how you add ED to make a past tense, but grammatically very much under the same umbrella.
At any rate, my point still stands. In 966 previous solutions, nearly halfway through the freaking list, they haven’t done this before, by whatever definition of ‘this’ you choose. And if you need the list of possible future solutions to make sense what exactly ‘this’ is, that’s a problem.
“Cried, dried, fried and tried” - what, Josh left off ‘pried’? And 'plied," as in ‘he plied her with drinks’?
Nope, I was just giving examples off the top of my head. Looking at the original answers list now: cried, dried, fried, plied, pried, shied, spied and tried are all there. Also on the original answers list: bused, clued, freed, kneed. Those are the 12 past tense verbs ending in ED that appear on the original list. There are also other words that end in ED but are not verbs, such as the recently used “embed.”
Thanks @EllisDee , as one who doesn’t use the lists I would have never known that. I believe the ied words are technically considered irregular past tense, but bused, clued, freed, kneed should be standard. Wonder why they chose to include just those few?