Hints and the answer to today’s Wordle word
If you need a little hint to set you on the right track towards solving today’s Wordle, look no further, becauses just below we’ve put together a trio of clues to help you out. Or, if you just want to know the answer, scroll down below the video to see it in full along with its definition.
Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December!
Wordle December 15 hints
Want some help with the Wordle answer today? Here are some clues to get you started:
It’s time to reveal the answer to today’s Wordle. The word is…
RIVAL.
A rival is an opponent or competitor to another individual or group, who aims to attain a superior position within the same field, or else is aiming for the same objective. To rival is also a verb, meaning to be equal or comparable to another. Here’s a fun fact about the derivation of this word: it comes from the same Latin root as “river”, and literally means “someone in the same stream as another person”.
All in all, I think it’s fair to say that most of us would prefer to have a friend than a rival. And since you want to keep people on your side, do be sure not to spoil this answer for other Wordle players!
Wordle is a very straightforward word guessing game. The aim is to guess the correct five-letter word in just six guesses. With each guess, the individual letters of your chosen word will highlight green if they’re in the correct place, or yellow if they’re in the wrong place. If a letter doesn’t appear in the solution word at all, it’ll remain unhighlighted.
Using these clues you can start to narrow down the correct word by figuring out which letters are included in the word and in which positions they belong. Head over to theWordlesite to try it for yourself. Just remember: there’s only one Wordle puzzle released per day, so if you want to play again, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
Wordle began life as a little family game created by software engineer Josh Wardle. He created the game so that he and his partner could play a fun little word game together during the pandemic, and they quickly realised that there was something quite special in this simple little guessing game. So after a bit of refinement, Wardle released it to the public on his website,Power Language.
You can type in pretty much any five-letter word in the English language and Wordle will accept it as a guess. However, the answer is picked each day from a much smaller list of more common five-letter words. There are still thousands of possible answers, of course, but it means the answer will never be a word as obscure as, say, “THIOL”, or “CAIRD”, or “MALIC” (yes, those are all real words).
There are very occasional words which the New York Times will choose not to publish as the day’s Wordle answer, perhaps for reasons relating to recent news or politics. For example, shortly after news broke that Roe v Wade might be overturned in the United States, the NYT decided to change the March 30th word from “FETUS” to “SHINE”, as the feeling was that the word “fetus” was too politically charged a word in the context of recent events.
The New York Times has also been careful never to allow what they consider to be rude words as the answer to a Wordle puzzle. But of course there’s nothing stopping you from using even the dirtiest of words as guesses, as long as they’re accepted words in the dictionary, and as long as you realise that they’ll never end up being the answer.
If Wordle is starting to get too easy, there are a few ways you can make the game more challenging for yourself. The first choice is to turn on Hard Mode. You can do this on the Wordle site by clicking the cog icon in the top-right of the screen. Hard Mode means that any highlighted lettersmustbe used in all future guesses. This stops you from using the common tactic of choosing two words like “OUNCE” and “PAINS” to test all five vowels early on.
You can take it up another notch by playing by what we call “Ultra-Hard” rules. This means that every guess you entermustpotentially be the answer. If you were just playing on Hard Mode, and you typed “MOIST”, and the “O” appeared yellow, then nothing would stop you from making “POLAR” as your next word, even though it couldn’t possibly be the answer because you already know the “O” is in the wrong place. If you play by “Ultra-Hard” rules, that’s not allowed. You must adhere to every clue, and make sure every single word you enter is potentially the answer.
If after all that Wordle is still too easy for you, then you could always try one of the many other Wordle-inspired games online that have cropped up over the past year. One of our favourites isWorldle, in which you must guess a country of the world based on its shape. There’s alsoWaffle, which is about swapping letters in a completed grid to complete all the words;Moviedle, which shows you an entire movie in a tiny space of time and challenges you to guess the movie within six guesses; andQuordle, which tasks you with solving four Wordles at once with the same guesses.
If you need some help with future Wordles, be sure to check out our list of thebest Wordle starting wordsfor the greatest chance of success. You can also check out our archive ofpast Wordle answersto see which words have been chosen previously.
Use ourWordle Solver toolto help you figure out the answer to any Wordle in moments! Just pop your current guesses in the grid and watch the tool instantly give you all the potential answers.
