Today's Wordle Answer #591 - January 31, 2023 Solution And Hints

It's the last puzzle of January, so it's a wrap on all the interesting words this month's Wordle puzzles have brought our way. From the obscure (with words like "blurb" and "chard") to the tricky (with words like "pixie" and "belie"), it's been quite a fun and challenging ride. 

Today's Wordle answer is somewhere in between — it's not at all an obscure word; in fact, it's quite popular, but it might not quickly occur to you because it contains a repeated letter. We'll share a few clues that might help you crack the code faster, but if you prefer to cut to the chase, you can skip to the second section where we reveal the full answer.

The winning word is a significant symbol of the Christian religions, and in mathematics, it's an indicator to add things up. It has one vowel, "O," as its central letter. It has "S" as its last letter, but it is not a plural form (if you didn't know, plural forms ending with "S" can never be Wordle answers, according to the NYT's new rules for the game). 

"S" is repeated as the fourth letter, and the word rhymes with "sauce." You could replace the first letter with "G," in which case you'd have the term for income minus tax, or the number 144. If you replaced the first letter with a "D" instead, you'd have rubbish.

If the solution is still a mystery, the answer you seek is "cross." Apart from the usage contexts we've mentioned above, the British use the word to mean annoyed or irritated about something. In animal husbandry, a cross is an animal or plant resulting from cross-breeding. In football, a cross is a pass made across the field into the center, close to the goal of the opposing team (via Merriam-Webster).

Per Etymonline, the origin of the word is Old English "cros," which referred to the instrument of Christ's crucifixion. It is probably based on Old Irish "cros" and Latin "crux," which originally meant a tall, round pole, but went on to mean a stake on which criminals were hanged or impaled. Later, the word gained the figurative meanings of "trouble," or "misery."

Our first guess today was WordleBot's once-recommended starting word, "crane," which luckily contained two of the five letters in the winning word, and in the correct positions, too. It only took two guesses after that to crack the code.