Chicago woman rescued from naked kidnapper thanks to Wordle

Wordle to the rescue!

A naked man crept into an 80-year-old Chicago woman’s bed and held her hostage for 17 hours — but she was finally rescued after her daughter called the cops because the woman hadn’t texted her the day’s Wordle answers, WBBM-TV reported.

Denyse Holt was asleep on Saturday when the mentally ill man broke into her home in the Windy City’s Lincolnwood neighborhood, according to the outlet.

The intruder — identified as 32-year-old James H. Davis III, who was reportedly bloodied from a broken window — slipped into Holt’s bed while clutching a pair of scissors, the station said.

 “I was in shock,” said Holt, who tried to remain calm during the ordeal. “I was trying to survive, that’s all. He said, ‘I won’t harm you or molest you.’”

He ordered her to take a shower with him in her nightgown but “then he said, ‘No, I’m not warm enough. We have to take a bath,’” she recounted.

After the bath, she said, he dragged her around her house, disconnected the phones and took a couple of knives from the kitchen before taking her to a bathroom in the basement, which he blocked with a chair.

To pass the time, Holt did exercises in total darkness.

“I didn’t think I was going to live. I was doing marching and stretching as much as I could,” she said.

Eventually, Holt’s daughter Meredith Holt-Caldwell, who lives in Seattle, noticed that her mother had not texted her about the word-logic puzzle, as she usually does.

“I didn’t send my older daughter a Wordle in the morning — and that was disconcerting to her,” Holt said.

The family then called police, who responded to Holt’s home about 9:40 p.m. Sunday. A SWAT team used a stun gun to overpower the man after an hours-long standoff, the outlet reported.

“I never thought in a million years this is what was happening, but it was,” Holt-Caldwell told WBBM.

Davis was charged with home invasion with a dangerous weapon, aggravated kidnapping while armed with a dangerous weapon and aggravated assault against a peace officer.

“I’m very lucky,” said Holt, who was physically unharmed.

Wordle, developed by New York City-based software engineer Josh Wardle, is the latest viral trend among English-language puzzlers on social media.

Players have to guess the correct five-letter word in only six attempts, using only the letters on the board as hints.