Today's Wordle Answer #564 - January 4, 2022 Solution And Hints

Today's answer is something you'd figuratively peel back while solving each Wordle puzzle. If you're familiar with poultry farming, you'd know the word as the name of the "golden hen," the money makers. It took us all six attempts to solve for the answer, even though we already had three green tiles on the third try. To give you a head-start, we'll supply clues that'll hopefully help you finish faster than we did. If you prefer to cut to the chase, you can skip to the second section where we do a full reveal of the answer, no teasers.

The word you're looking for is a noun, but it can also double as a verb depending on context. It has two vowels, "A" and "E," as its second and fourth letters, respectively. There are no repeating letters, and it's a near-rhyme with the word "surveyor." The word describes a stratum of something under or above which there's another — onions have a lot of these, and so do people.

If you replaced the third letter of the answer word with "G," you'd have the name of the kind of beer that's most widely consumed in the world. You could also swap the third letter of the answer word with "S" to get the name of a machine that emits intense, monochromatic light beams. If you added the "S" to the beginning of the word, you'd get the slang term for an Instagram "baddie."

If you haven't cracked the code yet, the word you're looking for is "layer." Figuratively, you might say you need to peel a complex issue back layer by layer to get to the root of it, and those agricultural references aren't a mere coincidence. In farming, apart from a hen that lays eggs, a layer also refers to a branch or shoot of a plant that forms roots while still attached to the parent plant (via Merriam-Webster).

According to Etymonline, the word layer is an agent noun derived from the root word "lay," which traces back to Old English "lecgan," meaning to place something on the ground (or other surface) in an orderly fashion. "Lecgan" itself is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root "legh-," or to lie down.

If you've seen the "Knives Out" sequel, "Glass Onion," you might remember Benoit Blanc's usage of the word in his insightful remark about the actual Glass Onion structure in the film: "An object that seems densely layered, but in reality, the center is in plain sight."