Today’s ‘Wordle’ Hints And Clues For Friday March 1st — Wordle #986 Answer

Farewell, February. It was fun having a Leap Year and getting that extra day, but then again it’s an extra day of winter and I am very much over it. Bring on Spring!

Some consider the first of March to be the first day of Spring. Officially, it begins on the Spring Equinox, which is Tuesday, March 19th this year. By then, we’ll be several days past Wordle #1000.

For the purposes of my own sanity, I’m calling it the first day of Spring today. Farewell February, farewell winter. Summer is coming. Eat your heart out, Ned Stark.

Let’s Wordle.

How To Solve Today’s Wordle

The Hint: The moment you really start to feel old.

The Clue: This Wordle begins with a consonant.

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The Answer:

Wordle Analysis

Every day I check Wordle Bot to see how I did. You can check your Wordles with Wordle Bot right here.

Since Wordle Bot has gone back to using crane as its preferred starting guess, I used the former favorite today: trace—which was gone without a trace only weeks after the Bot started using it. Slate held a much longer tenure.

Trace was quite a good guess for me, it turns out, leaving me with just 39 words to choose from and two yellow boxes. I figured I’d rearrange those boxes instead of guessing all new letters and decided to go with birth because I was thinking about being born on Leap Day and how odd that would be.

This did quite well, and after some pondering I finally came to the answer: forty, which I am on the other side of now. Huzzah?

Competitive Wordle Score

I get 1 point for guessing in three and 1 point for beating the Bot, who actually took four tries today. Huzzah!

Today’s Wordle Etymology

The word “forty” has an interesting etymology that traces back through the history of the English language and its predecessors. It comes from the Old English word “feowertig,” which itself is derived from “feower,” meaning “four,” and the base “-tig,” which is a suffix used to form multiples of ten. Therefore, “feowertig” essentially means “four tens,” or forty.

The use of “-tig” is common in the Germanic languages, a family to which English belongs. This suffix is related to the word “ten” and is used in forming the words for multiples of ten in many Germanic languages.

Over time, “feowertig” underwent phonetic changes, as is common in the evolution of languages. Middle English saw it become “forti” or “fourty,” and eventually, the modern English “forty” was established. Interestingly, the change from “fourty” to “forty” is somewhat of an exception in English spelling rules, as it is the only place where “four” changes to “forty” instead of following the expected pattern (like “fourteen”).