Thank you. But that still indicates I was wrong - the possible solutions appear to be essentially the same - even if particularly different. I was surprised to see "slave" as an illegal guess.

But it would appear that the difference in previous solution: stairs vs royal(I think ?) might just be slightly different word lists for the solutions... I thought there was much more of an edit.

They changed some obscure and offensive words initially, but there have been recent news articles around days where people had 2 different solutions to the same puzzle.

Initially I suspected that this was NYT watching for how unusually difficult words play out and then changing the answer on the fly to be a simpler word. But I think in reality these were the same changes they made shortly after the acquisition and somehow people have the old JS file cached locally.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/31/why-wordle-game-284-had-tw...