Live: an even more challenging Wordle answer #270, March 16

Okay, onto today’s puzzle. After last week’s Wordle caused complaints, you’d think the New York Times might avoid choosing a word with so many possible variables. With March 11’s puzzle, you could land on the ‘_atch’ part of the solution quickly and run through six perfectly reasonable variations of the answer without landing on the correct solution. ‘latch’, ‘patch’, ‘catch’, ‘match’, ‘natch’, and ‘batch’ would all seem like good answers and they would have got you no nearer to a winning answer. 

Of course, what made it more frustrating for anyone who lost their winning streak on March 11 was that the correct answer – ‘watch’ – could escape your thinking because it had a different phonetic sound. You could lock in on the ‘atch’ sound and entirely miss the ‘otch’ possibilities.

Today’s answer, if anything, is more frustrating because if you’d tried to learn the lesson of last week’s puzzle you’ll have been led astray. If you’d landed on the ‘_ater’ ending of the word and entered ‘later’, ‘hater’, ‘rater’, you may have taken a step back, thought of last week and tried ‘water’. Aiming for that different-sounding version of the same letters. You might, like me, have thought yourself pretty smart when you pressed enter. And, like me, sworn when it was another failure.

If Wordle has a lesson to teach us it is to remain humble.