If you’re still scratching your head, the mystery word is leapt. It’s the past tense of leap, which means to jump, and is from the Old English word “hleapan” of the same meaning, literally “to spring clear of the ground by force of an initial bound,” itself from Proto-Germanic “hlaupanan” (via Etymonline). The word leap is popular in the phrase “leaps and bounds,” which is a repetition to emphasize that something is growing or progressing rapidly. The word is also famously used in the term leap year, which describes a year with 366 days instead of 365. Since we were on the topic, we wondered why it’s even called a “leap” year, so we went digging and found a very interesting explanation.
Simply put, a leap year is so called because the year leaps over a day, but that’s not even the interesting bit — the more fascinating inquiry is why we even have leap years in the first place. So, a Gregorian calendar year is typically 365 days long, but that’s actually a rounded number. The precise number of days it takes our planet to revolve around the sun is 365.242190, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds (via Air and Space). The extra time has to be accounted for somehow, or else it’ll accumulate and throw off our estimations of seasons. It might begin as a minor annoyance, but over 700 years, summers — which the northern hemisphere experiences in June — would begin to occur in December!
We hope you landed the answer in time to keep your Wordle streak going. If you’re looking for more challenges, here are more games like Wordle to keep you busy.
