Wordle
What is Wordle?
Who developed Wordle and when?
How does Wordle indicate correct and incorrect guesses?
When did The New York Times acquire Wordle?
• Do you start with the same word every day, or do you vary your opening words?
• How long is your streak?
• Have you ever solved it in one?
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If those questions confound you, then you probably are not a regular player of Wordle, a popular web-based word game in which users have six tries to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, players receive color-coded feedback showing whether the letters in the submitted word appear in the answer. Wordle was developed by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle, who created a prototype of the game in 2013, inspired by the game Mastermind. Wordle was acquired by The New York Times in 2022. In 2026 NBC announced that Wordle would become a prime-time game show, hosted by Savannah Guthrie.
Gameplay
A new puzzle is published each day. The player has six tries to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, the letters in that word that are not in the day’s word turn gray. The letters in the guessed word that are in the day’s word and are in the correct place turn green. The letters in the guessed word that are in the day’s word but are in the incorrect place turn gold. Wordle draws its daily answer from a list of about 2,500 five-letter words, just a fraction of the roughly 13,000 five-letter words in the English language. The game eschews uncommon or obscure words, as well as words that might be deemed offensive or profane. Each day’s answer is the same for all players worldwide.
Development
This article contains more than 50 five-letter words that you could use to play today’s Wordle. Some opening words are better than others. Consider the following:
- Does the word have repeated letters?
- Does it have multiple vowels?
- Does it include common consonants such as T, R, S, L, and N?
Wardle, who had previously been a software engineer at Reddit, created a prototype of the game in 2013 for his partner, who enjoyed word games. He originally planned to call it Mr. Bugs’ Wordy Nugz. He reportedly lost interest in the prototype until 2020, when he revisited the game after playing word games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Wardle first released the game to a group of friends and family in late 2021, and it rapidly grew in popularity. On the first Sunday in 2022 more than 300,000 people played. A week later that number was two million. Wordle was Google’s most searched word in 2022, and seven of that year’s answers, including cacao, canny, foray, tacit, and saute, were among Google’s top 10 searched definitions.
Acquisition by The New York Times Company
Although Wardle had not initially planned to make money from the game, he became overwhelmed by the responsibilities associated with curating such a popular pastime, including dealing with the monetized copycat versions that popped up. After running a feature on the game earlier that month, on January 31, 2022, The New York Times Company announced it had purchased Wordle for “an undisclosed price in the low seven figures.” (That means at least $1 million.)
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Millions of people play Wordle every day, making it one of the world’s most popular word games. Sharing Wordle scores became a cultural phenomenon in the 2020s with families and friends making a daily ritual of score-sharing. (Wardle developed a way to share how many turns it took to solve the puzzle without giving away the answer in late 2021.) The ritual has, quite literally, saved at least one life. In 2022, when an Illinois woman did not share her Wordle score with her daughter on the West Coast, the daughter became concerned and asked a neighbor to check on her mother. The mother had been locked in her basement by an intruder and was rescued.
The New York Times has changed the pool of answer words in order to keep the game “distinct from the news.” For example developers removed the word fetus in May 2022, when they discovered that it had, by chance, been scheduled to be a Wordle word the week after the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked. The game remains free to play on the Times website. The Wordle television show is expected to begin airing in 2027.