Wordle

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2021 · A web page made by Josh Wardle; spread on Twitter · Also known as Wordle grid; NYT Wordle; Mr. Bugs' Wordy Nugz (early prototype)

What it is

Wordle is a word puzzle played on a web page. Each day there's one hidden five-letter English word, the same for everyone in the world, and you get six guesses. After each guess the letters change colour: green means the right letter in the right place, yellow means the letter is in the word but somewhere else, grey means it isn't in the word at all. When you finish, the game gives you a grid of coloured squares that shows how you did without revealing the word.

Where it came from

Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer living in New York, built a rough version in 2013 and picked it up again during the Covid pandemic for his partner, Palak Shah, who liked word games. He put it online in October 2021. It grew slowly until December 2021, when he added a button that copies your result as a grid of small square symbols, an idea he took from players in New Zealand who'd been typing the grids out by hand. The grids then spread across Twitter. Players went from 90 on 1 November 2021 to over 2 million by mid January 2022, and the New York Times bought it at the end of that month for what it called a low seven-figure sum.

How people used it

Most people played once a day, often first thing in the morning, then pasted their grid into a public post or a family group chat. A typical post read "Wordle 210 3/6" followed by rows of grey, yellow and green squares. Because the grid showed the pattern and hid the letters, friends could compare scores without spoiling the answer. The expected reply was your own grid, or a moan about a nasty word. People argued about the best first guess (ADIEU was popular, though words like CRANE and SLATE did better) and kept streaks of unbroken days. Hundreds of copies appeared: Quordle made you solve four words at once, Heardle used song clips and Worldle used the outlines of countries.

Why it mattered

It gave people scattered by the pandemic one small thing to do on the same day as everyone they knew. One puzzle a day meant it took a few minutes and then stopped, and in its early months it had no adverts and asked for no money. The grid let people show off, and for many families it became a daily way of checking in. Its sale to the New York Times turned it into a story about what happens to a hobby project once it gets big: the paper later took some words it thought offensive off the answer list, added logins, and people complained about lost streaks and any change to the word list.

The jokes around it

• Grids posted with no comment at all, to the irritation of people who didn't play.
• The endless row over the best opening word, usually ADIEU against CRANE.
• Absurdle, a version that keeps changing the answer to dodge your guesses.
• Lewdle and Sweardle, copies where every answer is a rude word.
• The day the answer was FAVOR and British players objected to the spelling.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People wanted to be seen doing the same small thing as everyone else, and the coloured grid let them prove it without spoiling it for anyone. The game only took off once there was an easy way to post about it.

What noah is not sure of

The NBC prime time game show said to be planned for 2027 comes from the specimen text and isn't checked. The exact date in December 2021 when the share button was added isn't certain. Player numbers are Wardle's own figures as reported by the New York Times.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.