A piece of cloth, or other suitable material, sewed or otherwise fixed upon a garment to repair or strengthen it, especially upon an old garment to cover a hole.
A small piece of anything used to repair damage or a breach; as, a patch on a kettle, a roof, etc.
A piece of any size, used to repair something for a temporary period only, or that it is temporary because it is not meant to last long or will be removed as soon as a proper repair can be made, which will happen in the near future.
To mend by sewing on a piece or pieces of cloth, leather, or the like.
“His sleeves had patches on the elbows where different fabric had been sewn on to replace material that had worn away.”
PATCH is a 5-letter word with 1 vowel (A) and 4 consonants (P, T, C, H). Every letter is distinct, so it rarely punishes a clean opening guess.
It leans on high-frequency letters (A, T), so a strong vowel-and-common-consonant opener tends to light up quickly. There are no rare letters here, so it is a fair, mid-difficulty answer for the daily Classic puzzle.
Across the 1,734 curated answers in the Wordocious bank, A appears in 40% of answers (the 2nd most common letter), T appears in 30% of answers (the 4th most common letter), C appears in 19% of answers (the 10th most common letter). 16 other answers share the opening “PA-”, so two purple tiles up front still leave real guessing to do.
Difficulty: 2/5 — approachable, because 7+ near-miss answers compete for the same greens.
One letter away in the answer bank: HATCH, CATCH, PITCH, MATCH, WATCH, LATCH, BATCH. Each of these turns four tiles purple against PATCH — the classic endgame squeeze where spending a guess on the differing letter beats burning attempts on hope.
Words like PATCH are exactly what the daily puzzles throw at you. Warm up in Practice, race the clock in the Daily Challenge, or study the best starting words before your next run. New to the multi-board modes? The mode guides cover every mode.
Definitions adapted from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API (CC BY-SA). Letter statistics, difficulty ratings, and near-miss analysis are original Wordocious research computed from our curated answer list.
