Without giving actual examples that might act as a spoiler for today’s word, here is how I understand it.
After line 2, I could have stopped and thought and realised, there are now many plausible solutions that only differ by one letter (the fourth letter in my case). Rather than picking one of these, then trying another and another… I could have tried to find a word that I knew would not be the solution, but contained several of the fourth letters in the various possible solution words. If I found such a word and used it as a third line guess, it could have eliminated several possible solutions in one go. That might have saved me several wrong guesses and narrowed things down, so that I would be more likely to get the correct solution on my fourth or fifth guesses.
