Today's Wordle Answer #572 - January 12, 2023 Solution And Hints

Today's Wordle answer is the past tense of a verb that means to act on something without enough thought. If you're struggling to solve the puzzle, the opposite is probably the case for you: you're giving it a lot of thought, especially if you're running out of time. We'll give you some hints that should help you crack the code on time, and also reveal the full answer in the second section so you can skip there if you don't mind the spoiler.

The word you're looking for has two vowels, E and A, as its second and third letters, respectively, and there are no repeated letters. If someone arrived at a takeaway without adequately considering the situation, you'd say they've [solution word] to that conclusion. The present tense of the word is what you'd say someone is doing if they're moving from one topic to another without really concluding any. It's also what a year does when it works overtime, and you'd advise someone to look before they did it.

If you're still scratching your head, the mystery word is leapt. It's the past tense of leap, which means to jump, and is from the Old English word "hleapan" of the same meaning, literally "to spring clear of the ground by force of an initial bound," itself from Proto-Germanic "hlaupanan" (via Etymonline). The word leap is popular in the phrase "leaps and bounds," which is a repetition to emphasize that something is growing or progressing rapidly. The word is also famously used in the term leap year, which describes a year with 366 days instead of 365. Since we were on the topic, we wondered why it's even called a "leap" year, so we went digging and found a very interesting explanation.

Simply put, a leap year is so called because the year leaps over a day, but that's not even the interesting bit — the more fascinating inquiry is why we even have leap years in the first place. So, a Gregorian calendar year is typically 365 days long, but that's actually a rounded number. The precise number of days it takes our planet to revolve around the sun is 365.242190, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds (via Air and Space). The extra time has to be accounted for somehow, or else it'll accumulate and throw off our estimations of seasons. It might begin as a minor annoyance, but over 700 years, summers — which the northern hemisphere experiences in June — would begin to occur in December!

We hope you landed the answer in time to keep your Wordle streak going. If you're looking for more challenges, here are more games like Wordle to keep you busy.