Today's Wordle Answer #547 - December 18, 2022 Solution And Hints
It's official — we must have found a four-leaf clover because we solved today's puzzle in three tries, just like yesterday and the day before. WordleBot solved it in four attempts and reported that it took most players just as many guesses to crack the code. To help you do it even faster than we did, here are some clues that should nudge you toward the solution. If you don't want to do mental gymnastics, you can skip to the second section for the answer.
Today's word can function as a noun, verb, and adjective — super versatile. It has two vowels, A and E, as its second and fourth letters respectively. There are no repeated letters. The word means to diminish gradually or progressively become narrower. If you replaced the fourth letter with I, you'd have the name of a pig-like herbivorous mammal with a trunk-like snout. If you swapped the first letter with P, you'd have the name of Dunder Mifflin's primary product (The Office fans unite!)
The answer sheds light
The solution to today's Wordle puzzle is TAPER. To taper is to decrease gradually. Taper as a noun means a slender candle or a long waxed wick used for lighting lamps, pipes, or fires. A taper could also describe someone or something that dispenses tape (via Merriam-Webster).
The word comes from Old English "tapor," which means a candle or wick and is likely a derivative of the Latin word "papyrus," which was used in Medieval Latin and other Romance languages to refer to the "wick of a candle" because those were typically made from the papyrus pith (via Etymonline).
Our starting word today was epically unlucky. We chose the word couch, and it left 1,211 possible answers! Thankfully, the second guess, plane, was a step in the right direction. It turned two tiles yellow and narrowed down the possible answers to just 13 – a dramatic representation of the word of the day. We made a lucky third guess, and we hope you find this article early enough to finish the puzzle even faster than we did.