Get an instant boost to your daily Wordle with today's tip: Click or scroll down for the January 17 (942) answer to get it on your plate.

After yesterday's bitter battle of answers, I was relieved that today's Wordle was much better behaved. The first letter of my first guess was helpfully green, and from there it only took a few careful pokes at the alphabet to find Wednesday's winning word. It was fun.

Medieval royalty, modern judges, and tennis players all spend time around, in, or on very different versions of today's answer. Today we have two different vowels.

There are no double letters.

Playing Wordle well is like getting a small victory every day:

There is no time pressure. It doesn't hurt to come back later if you struggle to find an answer or find a tactical word for your next guess.

Let's resume the game: the answer to the January 17 (942) wordle is COURT.

Knowing the answers to past wordls helps eliminate the possibility of the present. It is unlikely that the same word will be repeated, and you can find clues to help you guess or find a word you don't know.

Here are some recent Wordle solutions:

Wordle gives you six columns of five boxes each day, and your job is to eliminate or identify which five-letter word is hidden and which letter it contains.

You should start with strong words such as LEASH, i.e., words that contain multiple vowels, common consonants, and non-repeating letters; pressing Enter will show the correct or incorrect letter in the box. If the box goes to ⬛️, it means the letter is not in the secret word at all. A 🟨 means the letter is in the word but not in that position. 🟩 means that the correct letter is in the correct position.

The second time, you should compliment the starting word, using another "good" guess to cover the common letter you missed last time, while avoiding the letter you now know for sure is not present in today's answer. Then simply use what you have learned to narrow down the correct word. You can try six times in all, and you can only use real words (so you can't fill the box with EEEEE to see if there is an E). Letters can be repeated (e.g. BOOKS).

If you need further advice, see Wordle's tips. Also, if you want to know which words are already in use, scroll to the relevant section above.

Wordle was originally conceived by software engineer Josh Wardle as a surprise for his partner, who loved word games. From there it spread to his family and was finally released to the public. Since then, the word puzzle game has spawned a slew of Wordle-like games, focusing the daily gimmicks on music, math, and geography, and it wasn't long before Wordle became so popular that it was sold to the New York Times for a seven-figure sum. Indeed, it would only be a matter of time before we would be communicating solely through tricolored boxes.