Today's Wordle Answer #574 - January 14, 2023 Solution And Hints

Today's Wordle answer is native to Australia, but we want to bring it closer to home for you. It's a wild animal. Wordlebot says it took most players five guesses to figure out the answer, and that's not surprising considering it contains a repeated vowel. Also, the letter combination isn't the most straightforward. If you're struggling, here are some hints that should help you crack the code before you run out of guesses. And if you don't mind a spoiler, you can simply skip the teaser and check the full answer in the section below.

The word you're looking for has two vowels, O and A, but the latter is repeated as the third and fifth letter respectively. It describes a furry marsupial that eats toxins and spends most of its time snoozing in trees. The word rhymes with "Moana," and aligns closely with another word that describes a person who provides professional support to a woman during the course of a pregnancy.

Still unsure? The word you're looking for is "koala." It's a unique word, and the animals it describes are just as special. One interesting piece of proof is this: koalas have fingerprints, and they're the only animals other than primates that have them. They also have unique patterns on their noses, which helps wildlife biologists to identify and track them. Koalas mostly live on eucalyptus trees, and subsist on the leaves of the tree, which are quite toxic. Their digestive systems have a hard time separating meagre nutrients from this diet, and this means koalas only get a small amount of energy from their meals. It's why they sleep so much. On average, they spend 18 to 22 hours per day simply snoozing away (via Australia.com) .

Because koalas look like teddy bears, many people call them "koala bears," but that's a misnomer. A koala is simply a koala, not a kind of bear. Bears are mammals, which means they fully grow their young in the womb before delivery. Koalas are marsupials, which means that their young are born immature and they develop further in the mother's pouch, outside the womb, same as kangaroos and wombats. If you have a penchant for dad jokes, or are the unlucky audience of them, you'll probably have heard the famous koala joke, "why aren't koalas considered bears? Because they don't meet the koalafications!" (It's a real groaner.)

We solved the puzzle in four guesses, one more than yesterday, but we hope you do better. As usual, here are more games like Wordle if you want to keep the fun going.