Tag: wordle

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Answering the Prompt ‘Morning Rituals’

Many weeks ago, my laptop charger stopped working. While I acquired a replacement, I instead used the Jetpack app on my phone, which suggests a different prompt every day. I decided to keep that one handy for a slow week. That slow week has now arrived, so here’s the prompt:

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

I won’t go through everything I do in the morning, as much of it is keeping up-to-date with pals, but let’s look at some highlights.

For the past seven years, I’ve updated Instagram nearly every day with a themed picture. I decide on a different theme each month. We’re just coming out of April Angles, featuring pictures that contain adjoining or intersecting straight lines, including wall buttresses, a railway signal and a set of swings.

I also tackle two puzzles. The first is the classic Wordle, and I’m pleased to report I’ve now retrospectively caught up with all the puzzles. You need a paid subscription for this, and it’s now cancelled. The second is the seven-letter Full Rainbow anagram. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to catch up with missed puzzles, but it’s a lot of fun.

Thirdly, I’m off to Sweden with a pal at the end of next month. It’s only for a long weekend, and I hear English is widely spoken as a second language, but I’d like to learn a few handy phrases for emergencies. Another pal recommended Clozemaster, which shows sentences with one word blanked out, and you close the gap by clicking on the correct option or – for advanced users – typing it in. The free option offers up to 30 sentences per day. Later on, I intermittently listen to a Swedish talk radio station for extra listening practice.

However, I rarely write prose or poetry in the morning. One piece of writing wisdom you’ll likely hear is to keep a pencil and paper by your bedside for ideas that strike during the night. This simply doesn’t produce work for me. I need to be up and about before ideas start to emerge.

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A Play on Words

Back in December 2021, Wordle started to explode in popularity, with a reported two million daily players at one point.

As a fan of word puzzles, I thought this would be right up my street. However, I’m also someone who dislikes hype, so it took me a long time to start playing. In fact, it was January 2024, exactly two years after the game was bought over by The New York Times.

I’ve now enjoyed it for 108 days straight. Around a third of these were guessed on the fourth try, with a 23-26 split between the third and fifth tries respectively, and ten that went down to the sixth guess. There have been days when I simply haven’t reached the answer, leaving me with a disappointing 94% success rate and no way to make up for it other than continuing to win until the losses are statistically insignificant.

The other word puzzle I play of a morning is Full Rainbow, which gives visitors three minutes to unscramble a seven-letter anagram. Sadly, it’s not possible to open an account to keep track of your score; you can only use the same browser and make sure not to clear your cookies. Instead, my personal aim is to be in the top 50% of players for solving it quickly.

I’ve always enjoyed word puzzles, and I was even an early adopter of sudoku before it took off in 2004. It’s probably no wonder, as my gran avidly completed the puzzles in Take a Break each week, while my grandad preferred the daily cryptic crossword.

I’m convinced he would have enjoyed Wordle because a similar deduction technique can be used for solving crosswords. For example, whenever there’s a ‘K’ at the beginning of a word, it’s unlikely to be followed by a ‘U’, or if it’s near the middle or the end of a word, there is likely to be a preceding ‘C’.

At the time of writing, Wordle gameplay remains free of charge. There has long been speculation that this might change, although it has become almost a loss leader for the paper’s subscription puzzles. Until then, I’ll keep playing, with a view to restoring my score to an acceptable level.