Here’s the vowel-less word that made Wordle players all over the world crash out on Dec 19

Some Wordle players came close to having their day ruined and their disappointment immeasurable, as they reached their fifth try in a game of six chances to guess a five-letter word on Dec 19.

The five-letter word that day was “myrrh”. The New York Times, which owns the daily online puzzle game, described

the puzzle for that day

as “moderately challenging”.

Players have various strategies as they take a stab at the puzzle, such as identifying vowels first, and then tackling consonants later.

While this is often a workable strategy, lo and behold, it would not be so when the answer that day is a vowel-less word.

As such, a number of players took to the Wordle Subreddit to share their varied opinions.

User Reddit-Bot-61852023 said that this is the “worst ‘word’ I’ve ever seen since (I) started playing”.

Even The New York Times, in its caption on a Facebook post promoting the game, wrote: “I think today’s Wordle word is actually the worst in the entire history of the game.

“Wordle 1644 is trending as Friday’s puzzle is breaking many streaks.”

Another user even thought it was a fictional word. User ProfessionalBall2064 said: “(I) thought it was a made-up word from Game Of Thrones.”

Others, however, appreciated how the word fits in with the Christmas season. User MrsTaco18 said: “It’s seasonally appropriate, which made it a lot easier to guess.

“Any other month I probably would have puzzled over it for at least a few more minutes.”

“It’s seasonally relevant,” player Donna Morgan commented on The New York Times’ Facebook page.

On The New York Times website, commenter Dan said: “Sorry what was NYT on when they came up with this gibberish.”

Another commenter said: “Even after solving, I STILL can’t reliably spell MYRHH (sic).”

Singaporean player Wesley Ng, 25, told The Straits Times he spent nearly an hour guessing.

“I was nearing the 365 Wordle streak. It would have been a very unfortunate end to the year if it ended like this,” he said.

Nonetheless, he managed to solve the puzzle. He said: “It’s not a competition, but it feels good knowing that I managed to get it even when the word isn’t easy.”

Myrrh, in fact, exists in the corpus of the English language. According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, myrrh is defined as “a sticky substance with a sweet smell that comes from trees and is used to make perfume and incense”.

The word appears in carols, which are Christian religious songs sung at Christmas. It is one of the three gifts, apart from gold and frankincense, that the Wise Men presented to Jesus Christ at his birth.

The frustration of some Wordle players might be understandable, given that mentions of the word, according to data from Google, have steadily declined since the 1800s.

This is perhaps why the choice of myrrh led to a decided absence of mirth among players.