You shouldn't cheat at Wordle, but here's a weird way that you can
For decades, people have turned to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary for help defining puzzling words. Now they can turn to the site for help with a massively popular word puzzle.
The homepage of Merriam-Webster.com has become an unintentional source of tips for Wordle, the popular five-letter word-guessing game recently acquired by the New York Times.
Regularly over the course of the past week the day's Wordle solution has been trending on the site's homepage as one of the site's most-searched terms. Other words composed of similar letters as the solution, have also accounted for a sizeable chunk of the lists.
For example, on February 18, the day's solution - dodge - ranked among the site's top searches, which refreshes every 30 seconds. Also appearing on the most-searched list were variants like "podge" (something pudgy), "wodge" (a bulky mass or chunk), "bodge" (an outdated English unit of measurement equal to about half a peck) and "hodge" (an English rustic or farm labourer).
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Those terms intermingled with more expected terms that frame the current state of the world, such as "fascism," "false flag" and "woke."
On February 19, the word "swill" - that day's solution - was the most-searched term on the site, followed by "shill" at number 2.
Greg Barlow, president of Merriam-Webster, said he first noticed the phenomenon on Friday (Saturday NZ time). But he isn't sure whether people visiting the site are explicitly trying to
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