Today's Wordle Answer #542 - December 13, 2022 Solution And Hints
Today's Wordle puzzle isn't an uncommon word, nor does it have a particularly unusual letter combination. Yet, we used up all six guesses before we cracked the code. You probably won't suffer the same fate if you already started solving the puzzle and opened with one of the expert-recommended Wordle starter words — the answer contains two vowels that occur in many of these words. Here are more hints to help you turn all your tiles green on time, and if you don't mind the spoiler, you can skip to the second section for the full reveal of the answer.
The vowels we mentioned above are "O" and "E," and they're the third and fifth letters of the answer word, respectively. There are no repeated letters, and the word rhymes with "hope." It's the past tense of the action someone does when they say something to you, but it's also the name of the small rods that project from the center of a wheel and support the rim. If you replaced the second letter of the word with "M," you'd have a new word that describes fire emissions. Got it?
The answer makes wheels go round and round
If you're still unsure, the answer to today's Wordle puzzle (#542 – December 13, 2022) is spoke. In the context of being a wheel part, the word is from Old English "spaca," which means "spoke of a wheel, radius." It is related to "spicing" of the same origin, which means "large nail" — from the Proto-Indo-European base word "spei," which means sharp point, and is also the root of the word "spike" (via Etymonline).
Even though our random first guess, "wound," didn't turn up much info, we had turned two tiles green by the third guess with "chore." Unluckily, we tried the words "stoke" and "smoke" as our fourth and fifth guesses, respectively — they both had four letters in the correct position but the second tile was still gray. Thankfully, the answer became apparent on the sixth try. Phew. We hope you finish faster, and if you're looking to prolong the fun, here are some other games like Wordle to try.