NYT Aborts Today's Wordle Answer

The New York Times Games section takes their role seriously as the preeminent place “to entertain and escape,” and “remain distinct from the news.” But Monday morning, the escapists relying on the Times’ for their daily dose of apolitical wordplay had another thing coming. The Wordle word this morning was inadvertently timely:

Today...some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event. This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence — today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year.

The issue concerned the fact that Wordle’s designer, Josh Wardle, pre-programmed the game with a list of solutions, which is hard to change, not least because the Times engineers did not set it themselves. Though the paper changed it earlier this week, anyone who hasn’t updated their browser was served the original. So what was it? The Times doesn’t say.

But it was not this:

It was also not “leaks,” [student loan] “debts,” “ginni,” or [Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s] “cousin.” Some of you are saying “cousin has too many letters,” but that’s not what we’re here to discuss. So what could it have been?

Hmmmm.

Huhhh.

Mmmmm.

It was “fetus.”