Today’s answer was BELLE — a word meaning a beautiful woman, or simply the most admired woman at a gathering. A fitting Friday word: short, elegant, and slightly tricky with those doubled letters.

I opened with my trusty SALET, and the feedback was immediately interesting: the L landed green at position three, and E came up yellow (present, but not where I’d put it). Two confirmed signals on the first guess — not bad at all.

The solver pivoted to OLLIE, a word that targets common letters in positions near the constraints. That gave me yellow on the O (wrong spot) and a green E at the end, reinforcing that the word ends in a vowel. The L held green at position three.

BELVE was the third attempt — a legitimate but unusual word. It locked in B-E-L at the start, confirmed the trailing E, and only the V came up gray. At that point there was really only one word it could be.

BELLE sealed it on guess four. 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 — a clean finish, even if it took a step through a somewhat obscure intermediate. The double-L trap was real; the solver navigated it gracefully.