What in the world is Wordle?

 

If you’ve been anywhere near social media in recent months you can’t have missed those squares coloured green, yellow and grey. People celebrate or commiserate over how easy or difficult today’s Wordle was. For the first few weeks you ignore it, then you keep seeing the thing and you’re slightly curious, then you realise it is everywhere and you just have to know! Like is there just one official Wordle a day? Who creates it- is there a Wordle Master? Or do people create their own? Is it just an app? How do you even begin to guess what the word is? Why is it even called Wordle? So, so many questions. It’s time for answers.

So you go to this website to find the latest Wordle https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk

There it is. The Wordle. You have six goes to try and guess a five letter world. If you enter the right letter in the right box it goes green. If you enter the right letter in the wrong spot it goes yellow. A wrong letter altogether turns grey. You can try up to six words and then go on Twitter and boast or otherwise about your performance. Oh yes, when you show your result on the socials it doesn’t reveal the word, just the coloured squares. Its like a crossword without clues. The word resets at midnight. You don’t actually win anything except perhaps the respect of other players who have found themselves staring at a lot of grey and yellow squares.

The official estimate is that at least two million people play it every day but I think that’s a massive grey square because just judging from my Twitter feed, which is not enormous, I would calculate there must be so many more than that. It has become big enough for lots of tips and tricks to already be circulating - apparently adieu is the best word to start with so you can rule out some vowels. I bet there’ll be a How To Be More Wordley book by next month.

The inventor of Wordle is a software engineer called -brilliantly- Josh Wardle! I bet everyone in the office calls him Josh Wordle! Power Language does not seem to be an actual company but simply his own web page. Go to the home to find a simple landing page that says “Hi, I’m Josh. I like building unique products that focus on human interaction.” He describes himself as “an artist, product manager and engineer” who lives in Brooklyn. He was raised in the UK (hence the .co.uk address) and now works at an art collective called Mschf. He first created Wordle for fun before realising he wanted to share it more widely. He has form inventing things- in 2017 he created something called Place which was described as an online social experiment. 

Wardle has described Wordle as “a delightful snack like a croissant” and says it wasn’t really designed for endless playing. Neither it seems is it intended to dominate his life. In an interview earlier this month he said:  “I don’t want Wordle to be my full-time job, but I don’t want to invest in it or do any of that stuff. I’m very happy with where it’s at,. He told The Guardian that going viral “wasn’t great”. I suppose had he released it two years ago when we were all headed for lockdown probably everyone would be playing it.

Maybe it will sputter out like many an online craze (remember the Bucket of Water challenge, Yanni or Laurel et al?) There are already fake Wordle sites, some trying to charge but the Power Language site is the official one.  If you really want some tips, this is a typical example of how complex Wordle things can get..

The Best Starting Words toWin at Wordle | WIRED