You got locked into a common pattern?
When this happens I sometimes find myself thinking alphabetically in both directions to find the word and it turns into a phewfer. In these cases I often find that my gut is usually right or leads me if I try to see the common possible answers before I answer. But self doubt leads me to linear thinking as a safe path to the solution many times.

6 tries to guess roughly 14,000 possible words is still impressive.