My Wordle game today went from one extreme to the other, opening with an embarrassing grey row containing zero greens and yellows, only to then veer in the opposite direction, leaving me staring at four greens lined up neatly in a row. Thankfully, that meant I was able to snag today’s Wordle answer well before I was in danger of running out of guesses.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Thursday, May 11

This common household cleaning tool is said to be used by witches as a magical mode of transportation. There’s only one vowel today. 

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

Yes, a vowel is used twice in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If you’re new to the daily Wordle puzzle or you just want a refresher after taking a break, I’ll share some quick tips to help you win. There’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day. 

• A mix of unique consonants and vowels makes for a solid opening word. 
• A tactical second guess should let you narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• There may be a repeat letter in the answer.

You’re not up against a timer, so you’ve got all the time in the world—well, until midnight—to find the winning word. If you’re stuck, there’s no shame in coming back to the puzzle later in the day and finishing it up when you’ve cleared your head. 

Today’s Wordle answer

What is the #691 Wordle answer?

Let’s make sure you win. The answer to the May 11 (691) Wordle is BROOM.

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Keeping track of the last handful of Wordle answers can help to eliminate current possibilities. It’s also handy for inspiring opening words or subsequent guesses if you’re short on ideas for the day.

Here are the last 10 Wordle answers:

• May 10: ETHIC
• May 9: COCOA
• May 8: AGLOW
• May 7: GHOUL
• May 6: ANGER
• May 5: BELOW
• May 4: GUPPY
• May 3: HORDE
• May 2: SULKY
• May 1: RANGE

Learn more about Wordle

Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes every day and the aim is to figure out the correct five-letter word by entering guesses and eliminating or confirming individual letters.

Getting off to a good start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ARISE—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters—is a good tactic. Once you hit Enter, the boxes will show you which letters you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used, you can scroll to the relevant section above.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

Big tech firms haven’t enjoyed a good start to 2023. The wider economy, the war in Ukraine, lingering pandemic related issues and inflation has meant many of the world’s biggest companies including Meta (opens in new tab) and Alphabet (opens in new tab) among others have taken huge hits to their bottom lines. Sadly, for those involved, that means staff cuts. Intel is the latest company to announce a new wave of layoffs.

Just a couple of weeks back, Intel released a grim set of financial results (opens in new tab). It saw a loss of $2.8 billion, the largest in the company’s history. Add to that a massive 36% drop in overall revenue and it’s no surprise that Intel is seeking to tighten the purse strings.

Rumors began to surface last week, with Dylan Patel of Semi Analysis tweeting (opens in new tab) about major budget cuts and layoffs. Though unconfirmed at the time, Intel has since released a statement to Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab), which follows:

“Intel is working to accelerate its strategy while navigating a challenging macro-economic environment. We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company.

“We continue to invest in areas core to our business, including our U.S.-based manufacturing operations, to ensure we are well-positioned for long-term growth. These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect.”

That’s a polite way of saying there’s pain on the way. It’s not easy to cut double digit percentage chunks of your budget, especially in the capital heavy industry Intel is a part of. Money has already been spent on products and manufacturing that are many years away from seeing the light of day.

Hopefully not all of the departing staff will be given a watch and asked to hand in their passes. It’s probable some naturally departing staff won’t be replaced, somewhat easing the shock to the workforce.

There’s good news for us PC gamers though. Intel continues to invest in its product portfolio and its 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPU family (opens in new tab) is on track, as are future generation CPUs. Its process roadmap and stated aim to compete with and beat TSMC (opens in new tab) is also going to plan according to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Intel remains committed to US based manufacturing, in part thanks to the passage of the CHIPS act (opens in new tab), which aims to bring high tech manufacturing back to the US and disrupt the growing power of Asia based manufacturing. 

As long as the global economy continues to struggle, jobs will continue to be in jeopardy. The outlook for the PC industry in the second quarter isn’t looking especially great either, but at least Intel is taking steps to weather the storm.

And now I’ve discovered it’s all on YouTube, and has been looped. Some of the videos are shorter, like one that takes the cutscene music from the intro to the Assassins level (opens in new tab) of Thief: The Dark Project, which Garrett normally narrates over, and loops it before that part so we can hear it separate from the voiceover. That only goes for two-and-a-half minutes. If you prefer the ambience of Thief 2, here’s two of its atmospheric audio files, s01mel1.wav and s01mel2.wav, looped for an hour (opens in new tab).

YouTubers have gone further than that, of course. Which is why I’ve spent a significant chunk of today listening to a somber 10-hour loop of the Horn of Quintus (opens in new tab) from Down in the Bonehoard.

If you’re not familiar with the 10-hour trend, back in 2011 when YouTube first expanded its video-duration limit the internet briefly went wild for a 10-hour loop of Nyan Cat. Now you can listen to hours and hours of anything, including the tinny Portal radio version of Still Alive (opens in new tab), and the Tristram theme from Diablo (opens in new tab).

Because I’m easily distracted and have tinnitus, I often play instrumental music while I work. Today, my copy of Mogwai’s score for Les Revenants has gone unheard. Instead, I’ve been listening to an hour-long loop of loloop2.wav (opens in new tab), which I believe is the noise of those Tesla-coil electrical generator things in the haunted mines under Cragscleft Prison, and a 10-hour loop of the ambient sounds and muttering guard (opens in new tab) from Thief 2’s Running Interference mission. 

I’m a little concerned about the potential long-term side effects of this. What if I start reciting cynical monologues to myself or crouch-walking everywhere I go?

If you’d like to know something more practical about Thief’s audio, YouTube can help there as well. The Python Blue channel has been excavating some of its sources, finding the origin of various noises sampled in Thief: The Dark Project among the presets of the Korg M1 synthesizer’s Virtual Studio Technology software (opens in new tab), as well as the Earshot SFX sound effect library and other sources (opens in new tab), including Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Stabat Mater (opens in new tab), which provided some of the choral chanting, and a haunting track from 2001: A Space Odyssey called Lux Aeterna. Which, naturally enough, you can find an hour-long loop of on YouTube. 

Doom 2 was my favorite game in the ’90s, but I didn’t really love playing it. I played with cheats, primarily IDCLIP, which granted Doomguy the ability to walk through walls and thus explore the boundaries of maps, and was so blown away by the 3D worlds of id Software’s classic that battling monsters and collecting keys seemed boring by comparison. 

I’d sit in a dark room, listen to Cradle of Filth, and soak in the weird atmosphere of Doom’s hellscapes from inside their walls, taking in the uncanny rhythms of the enemies’ idle animations, and gaining some sense of how all those rooms, halls and courtyards connected together.

I didn’t have the internet for most of the ’90s, so I wasn’t aware of what was going on in the Doom mapping community. My uncle gave me a few disks of some fanmade .wads he’d downloaded and, crucially, a janky Doom map editor called WADED. That program changed the course of my teenage years. Instead of being a normal kid who rode his bike around town and spent time with friends, I was a normal kid who stayed alone inside and listened to black metal while making Doom levels. Which is much cooler.

I’ve since learned that WADED wasn’t the most widely used mapping tool in the ’90s, and the version I used was pretty buggy. It would frequently crash, and building worlds was always shadowed by the threat of lost work. From memory it didn’t play nice with overly large sectors (basically, the discrete blocks of a level with their own elevations, and floor and ceiling textures). But I was a teenager and so it didn’t matter: I had all the time and patience in the world for WADED, though others clearly didn’t. “Rofl WADED,” reads one review on Doomworld. “Are you serious, get a real editor.”

WADED didn’t have a steep learning curve, but it took me a while to figure out. Once I learned lines needed to form enclosed shapes, and then needed to be turned into sectors to form a room, my excitement knew no bounds. I could create anything I wanted! Small problem, though—turning a closed shape into a sector would, at least 30% of the time, cause the program to crash. Oh, well! I had nothing better to do than try again.

The first level I made was a big outdoor area with about 40 single-sprite trees and, uh, somewhere around 50 mancubi (opens in new tab). It was pretty crappy, but I played it heaps because I made it. I probably made a dozen similarly straightforward and artless levels before I learned how to make stairs (a series of long and thin sectors of ascending height, pressed together), doors (a sector with a line that raises that sector upward), and all the other features I once took for granted in Doom levels.

I was pretty keen on making levels that resembled real urban spaces. My specialty was levels with lots of outdoor environments, riddled with rectangular buildings decorated in elaborate tryhard facades. Enemy placement was mostly an afterthought. I didn’t build my levels with a player in mind because there weren’t any other players. I couldn’t upload them anywhere, and the few friends I had weren’t big on Doom. I would sometimes show my mum, and she would say she was proud. And then she would say that maybe I should go outside. Sorry, Mum, I’m busy building a recreation of the local petrol station (don’t mind the blood red sky).

I made maybe 20 levels I was happy with, dozens more I didn’t like, and probably hundreds of aborted projects. I’ve lost them all, but here’s the weird thing—sometimes my dreams take place in the Doom levels I made. They’re not heroic dreams where I’m slaying hundreds of imps with a BFG in one fell swoop: they’re just regular dreams that take place in these weird videogame areas I’m intimately familiar with.

If I was born a little later I probably would have played Minecraft in creative mode instead. Freeform experimentation is key to Minecraft, as it was in WADED, but I think it has to hit you when you’re young and have a ton of time to spare. Nowadays, I just play shooters the boring way.

This Wordle has got to be the first normal one I’ve encountered all week. I had no high mountains to climb or deep valleys to smooth out, just a gentle, even game where yellows turned into greens in a reasonable amount of time. Those greens were followed by more greens until I reached today’s Wordle answer with a few goes to spare. Thank goodness.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Friday, May 5

Any object or person that is either placed underneath another or physically exists beneath a defined location or item could be described using today’s answer. You might need to write your name _____ a line, for example. 

Is there a double letter in today’s Wordle? 

There are no repeat letters in today’s Wordle. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

A good starting word can be the difference between victory and defeat with the daily puzzle, but once you’ve got the basics, it’s much easier to nail down those Wordle wins. And as there’s nothing quite like a small victory to set you up for the rest of the day, here are a few tips to help set you on the right path: 

• A good opening guess should contain a mix of unique consonants and vowels. 
• Narrow down the pool of letters quickly with a tactical second guess.
• Watch out for letters appearing more than once in the answer.

There’s no racing against the clock with Wordle so you don’t need to rush for the answer. Treating the game like a casual newspaper crossword can be a good tactic; that way, you can come back to it later if you’re coming up blank. Stepping away for a while might mean the difference between a win and a line of grey squares. 

Today’s Wordle answer

What is the #685 Wordle answer?

I’m sure you almost had it. The answer to the May 5 (685) Wordle is BELOW. 

Previous Wordle answers

The last 10 Wordle answers 

Past Wordle answers can give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle-solving fresh. They are also a good way to eliminate guesses for today’s Wordle, as the answer is unlikely to be repeated. 

Here are some recent Wordle answers:

• May 4: GUPPY
• May 3: HORDE
• May 2: SULKY
• May 1: RANGE
• April 30: PLAZA
• April 29: CEDAR
• April 28: CIRCA
• April 27: LOGIC
• April 26: METRO
• April 25: JOKER

Learn more about Wordle

Wordle gives you six rows of five boxes each day, and you’ll need to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them to keep up your winning streak.

You should start with a strong word (opens in new tab) like ARISE, or any other word that contains a good mix of common consonants and multiple vowels. You’ll also want to avoid starting words with repeating letters, as you’re wasting the chance to potentially eliminate or confirm an extra letter. Once you hit Enter, you’ll see which ones you’ve got right or wrong. If a box turns ⬛️, it means that letter isn’t in the secret word at all. 🟨 means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 🟩 means you’ve got the right letter in the right spot.

Your second guess should compliment the starting word, using another “good” word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn’t present in today’s answer. With a bit of luck, you should have some coloured squares to work with and set you on the right path.

After that, it’s just a case of using what you’ve learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there’s an E). Don’t forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips (opens in new tab), and if you’d like to find out which words have already been used you can scroll to the relevant section above. 

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle (opens in new tab), as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle (opens in new tab), refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn’t long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures (opens in new tab). Surely it’s only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.