Today's Wordle Answer Thursday 17 March 271 with clues and solution

(Image credit: Wordle)

last updated 18 March 2022

Okay, that was close. Wordle 271 pushed us to the maximum 6 guesses and while the answer seems obvious in hindsight, at one point we were on the verge of rage quitting. And then probably tweeting about the New York Times making this much-loved word game too hard for mere mortals. However, today's Wordle answer – 271 in an ongoing series that will last until at the very least the end of the world – was hiding in plain sight the whole time.

But hey, why are you still reading this? We’re on to the Wordle 272 answer now…

Hints for Wordle 271

Wordle answer 271 — Wordle 271 is pure drama

A great director couldn't have scripted today's Wordle drama better. There were twists, turns, red herrings and – very nearly – an unhappy ending. Not very Hollywood. However, in the end, the good guys won – ie: we won. At Wordle 271.

How to solve Wordle #271

DON'T PANIC! We started with our usual vowel-heavy opening hand. If you do that too, you'll find that there are a lot of vowels in this answer. This caused us some panic as we were like this: OMFG this word has so many vowels in and we don't know that many words with loads of vowels in what can we do oh shit it's all gone wrong god damn.

However, do you know why we don't know all that many words with lots of vowels in? It's because there aren't all that many.

So with the help of your favourite deity and a grasp of the English tongue – sorry if that sounds gross. Imagine grasping a tongue; so slippery – you will be able to work out the answer before the clock strikes 6 guesses and out. Or like when James Bond or Captain Kirk stops the bomb timer just when it is down to 1.

Wordle #271 answer

Yeah, so you can see how we panicked here. Discovering today's word was made up mainly of vowels we basically burnt a guess by trying ELBOW – what the hell were we thinking of? That doesn't even have an I in it. VIDEO was the guess we should have gone for instead of elbow and in fact we typed that in with an air of 'checkmate, Comrade Wordle. Freedom wins again.'

Then when that turned out to be a little premature, we panicked again. You can clearly see from our first guess that the winning word does NOT have the letter I as its third letter. So why did we pick VOICE? We don't know. We're not proud of it.

Then we realised the answer must be MOVIE, and we felt very silly. But also very grateful that we were not playing on hard mode. Although if we were playing on hard mode, we just wouldn't have been allowed to make those two stupid guesses, so maybe we would have concentrated more and got it sooner.

Anyway, the answer is MOVIE. Like a film, in which an actor may use their VOICE, and which you may watch on VIDEO cassette if you are either very old, or excessively hipster. So it's like we knew all along really.

If you want to know more about the world's best loved word game that isn't Scrabble and also how to win at it, we suggest you read T3's guide to Wordle. It explains how the game is played and reveals our 'secret' moves that have still, to this point, given us a 100% Wordle win rate. Albeit only just.

When it comes to Wordle, who knows what tomorrow brings? In a world few hearts survive. All I know is the way I feel. When it's real, I keep it alive.

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years.

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."