Today's Wordle Answer #652 - April 2, 2023 Solution And Hints

April starts off on a mild note, excusing the irony of yesterday's puzzle solution. Today's answer is a common word, but WordleBot says it took most players four tries to figure it out. Considering there are only six attempts per puzzle, that counts as a close shave. To help you crack the code in as few guesses as possible, we'll share a few hints that should nudge you toward the answer word. If you don't mind a spoiler or prefer to cut to the chase, you may skip to the second section for the solution reveal.

The word of the day is a noun that can double as a verb, and it only has one vowel, O, as its third letter. There are no repeated letters, and the word contains the letter S. Per usual, we won't disclose its exact position, so we don't give too much away. However, per the NYT's modified rules for Wordle, you can rule out the possibility that it's the last letter. The word rhymes with "wok," and it's the unit of NASDAQ's offerings.

If you remove its first letter, you'd have a word commonly paired with the word "tick." You could also replace its second letter with P, in which case you'd have the name of the Star Trek character credited with the line, "Live long and prosper."

If you're still unsure, the solution to today's Wordle puzzle (#652 – April 2, 2023) is STOCK. The word has various meanings depending on whether you're talking about merchandise, financial investment, genealogy, or cooking, and we looked to the word's etymology to explain this variation.

Etymonline explains that the word is from Old English "stocc," which described a stump, post, or tree trunk, from Proto-Germanic "stauk-" of the same meaning. Per the same source, however, it is unclear how the word evolved to mean what it now means in some of the contexts above.

In its usage to mean "one's ancestry or line of descent," the connection is not too out of reach — it stems from a figurative use of the "tree trunk" sense, a play on the words "family tree.". The phrase "stock still" is also from this sense, as in to stand as still as a tree trunk. But this is as far as we could connect the dots of the word's evolution, and it is unclear how it came to mean commercial inventory or generic photos.

We solved the puzzle in three tries today — one lesser than the day's average. We chose "bloke" as a starting word, and after the second guess, "paint," we had three colored tiles and could make a correct third guess. We hope you finish even faster.