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Wordle
Developer(s)	Josh Wardle
Publisher(s)	Josh Wardle (2021–2022) The New York Times Games (since 2022)
Platform(s)	Browser, Mobile app
Release	October 2021
Genre(s)	Word game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Wordle is a web-based word game created and developed by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of coloured tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position. Wordle has a single daily solution, with all players attempting to guess the same word. During 2023, Wordle was played 4.8 billion times.

Wardle created the game to play with his partner, eventually making it public in October 2021. The mechanics are similar to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the television game show franchise Lingo. The game gained popularity in December 2021 after Wardle added the ability for players to copy their daily results as emoji squares, which were widely shared on Twitter. Many clones and variations of the game were also created, as were versions in languages besides English. Wordle was purchased by The New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed seven-figure sum and moved to the games section of The New York Times in February.

Gameplay

Every day, a five-letter word is chosen which players aim to guess within six tries. After every guess, each letter is marked as either green, yellow or gray: green indicates that the letter is correct and in the correct position, yellow means it is in the answer but not in the right position, while gray indicates it is not in the answer at all. Multiple instances of the same letter in a guess, such as the "o"s in "robot", will be colored green or yellow only if the letter also appears multiple times in the answer; otherwise, excess repeating letters will be colored gray. The game has a "hard mode" option, which requires players to include letters marked as green and yellow in subsequent guesses. The daily word is the same for everyone. The game also has a dark theme as well as a high-contrast theme for colorblind accessibility, which changes the color scheme from green and yellow to orange and blue.

Conceptually and stylistically, the game is similar to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the game show franchise Lingo. The gameplay is also similar to the two-player board game Mastermind—which had a word-guessing variant Word Mastermind —and the game Bulls and Cows, with the exception that Wordle confirms the specific letters that are correct.

Each daily game uses a word from a list of 2,309 words. The smaller word list was chosen by Wardle and his partner by filtering down lists she made by categorizing all the five-letter words into those she knew, those she did not know, and those she might have known. Wordle uses American spelling, and players outside the US have complained that this spelling convention gives American players an unfair advantage (e.g., the use of "favor" rather than the non-US "favour").

According to data collected by The New York Times, the most common first guesses are "adieu", "audio", "stare", "raise", and "arise". However, it was found that starting words such as "adieu" and "audio" may put people at a disadvantage as it takes more attempts for people to solve than if they start with words such as "slate". Computer algorithms can solve the puzzle with 100% accuracy within 5 of the 6 allowed guesses.

History

Early development

Wardle created the prototype of Wordle in 2013, inspired by the color-matching game Mastermind, under the name Mr. Bugs' Wordy Nugz. The prototype allowed players to play puzzles consecutively, and its wordlist was unfiltered. At first the game used all 13,000 possible five letter words in the English language, but he found that his partner Palak Shah had difficulty recognizing some of the less common words and made the guessing as haphazard as it was in Mastermind. He then used Shah as a simple filter to trim down the word list to around 2,000 words that were more recognizable – roughly five years of puzzles on a daily basis. After finishing the prototype around 2014, Wardle lost interest and set the prototype aside.

In the meantime, Wardle created the two online social experiments The Button and Place while working for Reddit. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, he and his partner "got really into" The New York Times' Spelling Bee and daily crossword puzzle. Wardle recalled his Wordle prototype and was inspired by two elements from Spelling Bee to flesh out the prototype further: the simple-to-use website design for the puzzle, and the limitation of one puzzle per day. By January 2021, Wardle had published Wordle on the web, mostly shared with himself and his partner. He had named it Wordle as a pun on his surname.

Rise in popularity

Later he shared it with his relatives, where it "rapidly became an obsession" for them. Over the next few months, he continued to share the Wordle website with other close friends, leading to the viral spread of attention to the puzzle by mid-October 2021. In one case, he found that it had become popular with a group of friends in New Zealand, where they had created the emoji-style display of the guesses which they shared with friends, which inspired Wardle to incorporate the feature into the game. After he had added this feature, the game became a viral phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021. A Gale-published article even claims that "Wordle is less about winning and more about the friends we make along the way" due to the new ease of sharing.

Over 300,000 people played Wordle on January 2, 2022, up from 90 players on November 1, 2021, a figure that rose to over 2 million a week later. Between January 1 and 13, 1.2 million Wordle results were shared on Twitter. Several media outlets, including CNET and The Indian Express, attributed the game's popularity to the dailiness of the puzzles. Wardle suggested that having one puzzle per day creates a sense of scarcity, leaving players wanting more; he also noted that it encourages players to spend only three minutes on the game each day. He also noted some subtler details about the game, such as the game's keyboard changing to reflect the game state, as reasons for players' enjoyment. He had said that he has no intention to monetize the game and "It's not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs ... It's just a game that's fun." In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today, Wardle stated that he does not know each day's word so he can still enjoy playing the game himself.

Separately, an entirely different game called Wordle! by Steven Cravotta, which had been released on the App Store five years prior to Wardle's Wordle, saw a boost in downloads and purchases from people who thought it was Wardle's game; according to Cravotta, between January 5 and 12, 2022, his game was downloaded over 200,000 times. Cravotta was glad to see his game's resurgence, though recognized purchasers were likely buying it thinking it was Wardle's Wordle. In collaboration with Wardle, he donated $50,000 from revenues to Boost in Oakland, California, a charity providing tutoring to Oakland schoolchildren.

Google Search created an Easter egg when one searches for "Wordle", with the site's logo becoming an animated game of Wordle to find the word "Google". To prevent play from being spoiled, Twitter took action to block an auto-reply bot that replied to any Wordle result post with the next day's word.

Acquisition by the New York Times Company

On January 31, 2022, the New York Times Company, the parent company of The New York Times, acquired Wordle from Wardle for an "undisclosed price in the low-seven figures." According to Wardle, the sudden attention he and his partner had gotten over the previous few months had made them uncomfortable, and also he did not feel like spending the effort to fight against clones of Wordle that were appearing. Wardle said that "It felt really complicated to me, really unpleasant", and that being able to sell the rights to Wordle made it easy "to walk away from all of that." Jonathan Knight of the Times games department contacted Wardle on January 5, 2022, two days after Wordle was featured in a Times article. With the acquisition by January 31, chief product officer Alex Hardiman said "I don't think I've ever seen us move on an acquisition this fast." Vanity Fair reported that the Times had just edged out The Washington Post in acquiring the game.

The Times intended to add the game to its mobile app alongside its crossword puzzles and Spelling Bee, seeking to bring in digital subscribers up to 10 million by 2025. The Times stated the game would initially remain free to new and existing users and that no changes would be made to its gameplay. Fans expressed worries that the acquisition meant the game would eventually be put behind a paywall. As the game operates entirely using client-side Javascript code run in the browser, some players have downloaded the webpage for offline use due to fears that the New York Times Company would modify the game undesirably.

On February 10, the game was officially moved to The New York Times's website, with statistics carrying over; however, some players reported that their daily streaks reset after the switch. The Times producers did not want to change any significant parts of Wordle except for two facets, moving the game to work in React so that it could be integrated with the Times online games app, and adding support for users to log in with their Times account as another way to track progress.

As part of the move, the Times eliminated some possible word guesses that they felt were insensitive or offensive terms such as "slave" and "lynch" so as to "keep the puzzle accessible to more people", and also eliminated some British spelling variants such as "fibre". The Times had also changed planned words in response to current events as to keep Wordle separate from the news. In May 2022, the solution word "fetus" was removed following the leaked draft decision in abortion-related United States Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, to keep the game separate from the news. As of July 2022, a total of seven words have been removed from the original 2,315 Wordle answers. Because of these deletions, the Times version of Wordle is now out of synchronization with cached or saved versions of Wordle, making it difficult for players of the two versions to compare their solution scores. By August 24, 2022, the New York Times Crossword app was updated to include Wordle, with player progression still synced between mobile and desktop versions.

On April 7, WordleBot was launched by the New York Times to give players information about how they completed their Wordle on that day, giving a luck and skill rating. Some users felt that the WordleBot responses became patronizing and insulting as the analysis of a player's completed puzzle progressed.

According to the Times quarterly earnings report ending on March 31, 2022, the acquisition of Wordle brought "tens of millions" of new players to the Times puzzle site and app, many of whom continued to play the other puzzles offered by the Times. Editors in the Times games department called the following months the "Hot Wordle Summer" due to further increases in players on their games app resulting from Wordle.

In September 2022, advertising was introduced.

According to CBS News Sunday Morning, Wordle was played 4.8 billion times during 2023.

Editor

In November 2022, the Times employed a dedicated editor, Tracy Bennett, to select the word of the day from a curated list. Speaking in January 2023 to Today she explained that the words are initially selected by a random system but she then checks each word for suitability. She eliminates those "if there are any, like, secondary meanings that are maybe either profane or derogatory", and she checks "to see if there's anything that would make one of those words feel more hurtful or insensitive than normal." Bennett also avoids words which are difficult to find because they have four letters in common with many other words, such as "found" where there are eight options for the first letter. The words that otherwise cause most complaints has been unfamiliar terms such as "parer", "rupee" and the US-specific "condo". Bennett did introduce the notion that the word can be connected to the day where it is the solution, such as "BEGIN" the day Bennett started, "MEDAL" on Veteran's Day (November 11), or "FEAST" on Thanksgiving (November 24). This type of theme or connection was not present in Wardle's original word list. The change was not appreciated by everybody, such as Slate's Lizzie O'Leary, who prefers Wordle to "stay hard and weird."

Usage

Wordle was the top Google search term globally and by American users in 2022. Because of the popularity of Wordle, Google searches from players looking to find out the definition of Wordle answers affected top Google search trends. Seven of the top 10 searched-for word definitions in 2022 were Wordle answers, including cacao, homer, canny, foray, trove, saute and tacit.

At the March 2023 Game Developers Conference, New York Times producer Zoe Bell shared data on the influence of Wordle to other Times online games. Player count for Wordle under the Times had peaked around March 2022, and while that has gone down, levels remained resilient to about half that count a year later. Importantly for the Times, the impact of Wordle has shown a growth in interest in the other games that the Times offers, with daily player counts continuing to grow as of March 2023.

Adaptations and clones

After Wordle's sudden popularity at the start of 2022, a number of clones appeared. Some of these revised the game logic in novel ways. Absurdle, created by British programmer qntm, is an adversarial version in which the target word changes after each guess, while remaining consistent with previously revealed hints. Other clones retain the game's mechanics while changing the word list. These clones range from translations into other languages to guessing swear words in Sweardle and NFL players in Weddle (named after former NFL safety Eric Weddle). Wordle has been ported to older hardware, including GameBoy Wordle for the Game Boy, Wordle DS for the Nintendo 3DS and a Nokia N-Gage port.

Other games used the "-le" suffix to indicate a connection with Wordle, even with significant gameplay differences. These include Semantle, where players try to find a word that is semantically similar; Redactle, in which a Misplaced Pages article has most of its text redacted until the player guesses enough words to deduce the article's subject; Squabble, in which Wordle is a battle royale; and Waffle, in which players organize scrambled letters in a five-by-five grid into six different words. The game has also helped popularize a variety of non-word games, such as Worldle, where players must identify a country or territory by its silhouette: text-based hints give the direction and distance from the wrong location to the target answer; Heardle, a Wordle-style game based on identifying songs, which was acquired by Spotify for an undisclosed sum in July 2022; Nerdle, where players must solve an 8-digit calculation involving numbers and math symbols; and Framed, where players must identify a film from a short clip. Other variants involve solving multiple Wordle-like puzzles at once. For example, Quordle, where players tackle four word puzzles simultaneously, was purchased by Merriam-Webster in January 2023 for an undisclosed sum.

A number of ad-supported Wordle clones appeared on Apple's App Store in early January 2022, but did little to alter the formula, even using the game's name. Users continued to seek out other Wordle clones on the App Store, and by the end of January, nearly all of the clones had been removed. The New York Times filed an application to register a trademark for Wordle shortly after acquiring it to help protect the intellectual property, and has been using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to issue takedown notices against source code repositories on GitHub that enabled simple clones of Wordle. In May 2024, the New York Times also initiated legal action against Worldle, a location-based guessing game in the same format as Wordle, claiming the name was a trademark violation; the developer of Worldle stated they would challenge the New York Times on this matter.

Languages

Shortly after gaining viral popularity among English-speaking users in January 2022, Wordle was adapted into other languages. An open-source version of the basic Wordle game was created by Hannah Park and modified by linguist Aiden Pine to handle other character sets, making the game amenable to more languages. Pine also has a free step-by-step blog explaining how to create your own Wordle. By October 2024, 780 Wordle-like games and resources had been documented across 158 languages by collaborative project "Wordles of the World". Listed are variants based on historical and regional dialects, indigenous languages, languages without alphabetic writing systems (such as Chinese chengyu and American sign language), and constructed languages such as Klingon.

Others

The New York Times and Hasbro partnered to create Wordle: The Party Game, a board game based on browser video game. It is a variant for two to four players, in which one player selects a secret word each round for other players to guess, following Wordle rules. The game was released in October 2022. Polygon's Charlie Hall described the physical game as a "cut-and-paste job" simply replicating the online game's mechanics without enhancing it for multiple players as a party game.

See also

• The New York Times Games – Casual games by The New York Times
• Hangman (game)

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External links

• Official website
• "Wordles of the World" – List of Wordle variants and language adaptations

• Video games
• Internet

• 2021 video games
• 2020s fads and trends
• Browser games
• The New York Times Games
• Video games developed in the United States
• Word puzzle video games
• Word games
• 2021 in Internet culture