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Wordle answer (Saturday 31 December 2022): Wordle word of the day #560 and hints

Hints and the answer to Wordle #560

A close-up of part of a Wordle grid. The letters spell "what is the answer".
Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Looking for the Wordle answer for Saturday 31 December 2022? And so 2022 draws to a close. Although I try to avoid generalisations, I think it's safe to say it's been a challenging year in many ways, one that I'll personally be celebrating the end of later tonight. Yet whether your plans for New Year's Eve involve a party or a quiet night watching Jools, be sure to make time to complete today's Wordle puzzle.

Below you'll find three clues to help speed you toward your final Wordle answer of 2022. If you're simply looking for the Wordle answer today to maintain a steak, scroll a little farther down the page for that.


Looking for today's solution? Check out the Wordle hint and answer for Friday 26th July!


Wordle December 31 hints

The Wordle answer today isn't the toughest we've seen recently, although it is likely to foil some of the more common starter words. If you're struggling to figure it out, here are three clues to help you do it yourself:

  • Today's Wordle word has only one vowel.
  • The first letter is "M".
  • The final letter is "Y".
Looking for an alternative to Wordle? Here are eight of our favourite Wordle-likes to add to your morning puzzle routine.Watch on YouTube

Wordle answer today December 31

It's time to reveal the answer to today's Wordle. The word is...

MANLY.

Manly refers to someone possessing traits typically associated with men. Which, obviously, depends heavily on the historical period and/or community of people you're talking about. In eighteenth century Europe, for example, it was considered the height of manliness to wear stockings and powdered wigs, a fashion sense that differs greatly from the understated formalwear European men usually wear today.

Now that you know the Wordle answer today, please ensure to keep it a secret, whether you consider yourself to be manly, womanly, or neither. Come midnight, a new Wordle puzzle will arrive with the new year, at which point you can discuss the knotty nuances of manliness as much as you like.


How to play Wordle

Wordle is a very straightforward word guessing game. The aim is to guess the correct five-letter word in just six guesses. With each guess, the individual letters of your chosen word will highlight green if they're in the correct place, or yellow if they're in the wrong place. If a letter doesn't appear in the solution word at all, it'll remain unhighlighted.

Using these clues you can start to narrow down the correct word by figuring out which letters are included in the word and in which positions they belong. Head over to the Wordle site to try it for yourself. Just remember: there's only one Wordle puzzle released per day, so if you want to play again, you'll have to wait until tomorrow.


How did Wordle begin?

Wordle began life as a little family game created by software engineer Josh Wardle. He created the game so that he and his partner could play a fun little word game together during the pandemic, and they quickly realised that there was something quite special in this simple little guessing game. So after a bit of refinement, Wardle released it to the public on his website, Power Language.

The game was released in October 2021, and by the end of the year the game had two million daily players. It became a viral hit, thanks in large part to the ease with which players could share their results in a spoiler-free manner on Twitter and other social media sites. In January 2022, Wardle accepted an offer form the New York Times to acquire Wordle for a seven-figure sum. Well done, Mr Wardle. Well done indeed.

Are any Wordle words not allowed?

You can type in pretty much any five-letter word in the English language and Wordle will accept it as a guess. However, the answer is picked each day from a much smaller list of more common five-letter words. There are still thousands of possible answers, of course, but it means the answer will never be a word as obscure as, say, "THIOL", or "CAIRD", or "MALIC" (yes, those are all real words).

There are very occasional words which the New York Times will choose not to publish as the day's Wordle answer, perhaps for reasons relating to recent news or politics. For example, shortly after news broke that Roe v Wade might be overturned in the United States, the NYT decided to change the March 30th word from "FETUS" to "SHINE", as the feeling was that the word "fetus" was too politically charged a word in the context of recent events.

The New York Times has also been careful never to allow what they consider to be rude words as the answer to a Wordle puzzle. But of course there's nothing stopping you from using even the dirtiest of words as guesses, as long as they're accepted words in the dictionary, and as long as you realise that they'll never end up being the answer.


Is Wordle getting too easy for you?

If Wordle is starting to get too easy, there are a few ways you can make the game more challenging for yourself. The first choice is to turn on Hard Mode. You can do this on the Wordle site by clicking the cog icon in the top-right of the screen. Hard Mode means that any highlighted letters must be used in all future guesses. This stops you from using the common tactic of choosing two words like "OUNCE" and "PAINS" to test all five vowels early on.

You can take it up another notch by playing by what we call "Ultra-Hard" rules. This means that every guess you enter must potentially be the answer. If you were just playing on Hard Mode, and you typed "MOIST", and the "O" appeared yellow, then nothing would stop you from making "POLAR" as your next word, even though it couldn't possibly be the answer because you already know the "O" is in the wrong place. If you play by "Ultra-Hard" rules, that's not allowed. You must adhere to every clue, and make sure every single word you enter is potentially the answer.

If after all that Wordle is still too easy for you, then you could always try one of the many other Wordle-inspired games online that have cropped up over the past year. One of our favourites is Worldle, in which you must guess a country of the world based on its shape. There's also Waffle, which is about swapping letters in a completed grid to complete all the words; Moviedle, which shows you an entire movie in a tiny space of time and challenges you to guess the movie within six guesses; and Quordle, which tasks you with solving four Wordles at once with the same guesses.


If you need some help with future Wordles, be sure to check out our list of the best Wordle starting words for the greatest chance of success. You can also check out our archive of past Wordle answers to see which words have been chosen previously.

Use our Wordle Solver tool to help you figure out the answer to any Wordle in moments! Just pop your current guesses in the grid and watch the tool instantly give you all the potential answers.

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