Today's Wordle Answer #548 - December 19, 2022 Solution And Hints

Today's Wordle puzzle was another three-try solve for us. That makes it a solid five days of the third try being the charm. If you've been keeping up with us for daily Wordle solutions, you should be boasting an even better streak by now. If not, today's a good day to start building one: we'll provide some clues that should help you unravel the answer quickly. If you don't mind the spoiler, you can skip to the second section for the full reveal of the answer.

The word of the day is a verb that describes the act of fixing an event or occurrence for a specific time, but it can also function as a noun, in which case it describes a fine-grained metamorphic rock, slabs of which can be used for writing. The word has two vowels, A and E, as its third and fifth letters, respectively, and there are no repeated letters. If you removed the first letter of the word, you'd have an adjective that could describe a person as behind schedule, or dead.

The solution to today's Wordle puzzle is slate. It's one of WordleBot's favorite recommended starting words, and it solved the puzzle in only one try today because that was its first guess. The word slate is from the Old French "esclate," the feminine version of "esclat," which means splinter. They were so named because the rock easily splits into thin plates.

The popular phrase "a clean slate" originated from the use of slates as writing boards: a student could get rid of the evidence of a mistake by wiping a slate clean. Slates were also used as customer logs in taverns to keep track of debtors, so wiping a slate meant a customer had settled their bill (via Etymonline).

Our opening guess today was the word bowel. Although it left 135 possible answer words, it was a much better start than yesterday's effort. There were still 15 possible answers after our second guess, clime, but we made a lucky third guess. We hope you finish faster.