'Wordle' Today #720 Answer, Clues and Tips for Friday, June 9 Puzzle

While many of us are able to breeze through the Wordle puzzles easily, every now and then the brainteaser throws a curve ball.

Thankfully, Newsweek is here to provide tips and tricks to ensure you can solve Friday's brainteaser.

The game's premise is relatively easy to understand, but what can often be a fun brainteaser can turn into a nightmarish challenge. Players follow a color system to work out a five-letter word and have six attempts to get the correct answer.

Green tiles show how many letters are in the word and in the correct position. A yellow tile means the letter is in the word but in the wrong place. A gray tile means that the letter is not in the word at all.

Speaking to Newsweek, Wardle clarified there was reasoning behind the game's structure.

In January 2022, he told Newsweek: "There is a reason that every word is five letters long and that you are allowed six attempts to guess it.

"That might seem arbitrary but with the prototype version, I tested different word lengths and experimented with the number of tries that players were allowed.

"Through that process of refinement, I figured out that five letters and six tries was the ideal sweet spot. It's just limited enough to feel challenging and to make you think, but most of the time people still manage to solve it. So, you feel a real sense of real accomplishment."

Today's answer will be revealed at the end of this article. Here are some clues that might help you along the way to working it out on your own.

Hint #1: There is one repeated letter in today's Wordle answer.

Hint #2: Friday's answer contains two vowels.

Hint #3: You may want to use "bakes" as a starting word as it will reveal two green tiles and one yellow tile.

Hint #4: Today's Wordle answer ends with the letter "a."

Hint #5: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines today's answer as being "a small raft or boat." A secondary definition lists it as "a tropical American tree of the silk-cotton family with extremely light strong wood used especially for floats."

The answer for Friday's puzzle is "balsa."

Hopefully you were able to figure out the word within the six tries permitted.

The next Wordle puzzle will be available at 7 p.m. ET, when the daily update occurs. While you wait for that refresh, you might want to try some alternative word puzzles instead, such as Typochondria or Spellspire.