Wordle

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This article is about the word game. For the method of visualizing text data that is also
known as "a wordle", see Tag cloud.

Wordle

Game #196 complete in 4 guesses

Developer(s) Josh Wardle

Publisher(s) Josh Wardle (2021–2022)

The New York Times Company (since 2022)

Platform(s) Web

Release October 2021

Genre(s) Word game

Official game logo by The New York Times

Wordle is a web-based word game created and developed by Welsh software

engineer Josh Wardle, and owned and published by The New York Times
Company since 2022. Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with
feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match
or occupy the correct position. The mechanics are nearly identical to the 1955 pen-and-
paper game Jotto and the television game show franchise Lingo. Wordle has a single
daily solution, with all players attempting to guess the same word.
Wardle initially created the game for himself and his partner to play, eventually making it
public in October 2021. The game gained a large amount of 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. The game
was purchased by The New York Times Company in January 2022 for an undisclosed
seven-figure sum, with plans to keep it free for all players; it was moved to their website
in February 2022.

Contents

 1Gameplay
 2History
 3Adaptations and clones
o 3.1Languages
 4References
 5External links

Gameplay
Every day, a five-letter word is chosen which players aim to guess within six tries. [1] After
every guess, each letter is marked as either green, yellow or gray: green indicates that
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. [2] 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.[3] The game has a "hard mode" option, which requires players to
include letters marked as green and yellow in subsequent guesses. [4] The daily word is
the same for everyone.[5] 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.[4][6]
Conceptually and stylistically, the game is similar to the 1955 pen-and-paper
game Jotto and to the game show franchise Lingo.[7][8][9][10] The gameplay is also similar to
the two-player board game Mastermind—which had a word-guessing variant Word
Mastermind [11]—and the game Bulls and Cows, with the exception that Wordle confirms
the specific letters that are correct.[12][13][14] Each daily game uses a word from a randomly
ordered list of 2,315 words (out of the approximate 12,000 five-letter words in the
English language).[12][15][16] The smaller word list was chosen by Wardle's partner, who
categorized the five-letter words into those she knew, those she did not know, and
those she might have known.[17] Wordle uses American spelling, despite the developer
being from Wales and using a UK domain name for the game; he is a long-time resident
of Brooklyn, New York. Players outside the US have complained that this spelling
convention gives American players an unfair advantage, for example in the case of
"favor".[18][19][20][21]

History

The emoji grid copied by sharing the result from the game at the top of this article.

Wardle initially created the prototype of Wordle in 2013, inspired by making a word-
based version of the color-matching game Mastermind;[22][23] the prototype allowed for
endless play, with players able to play puzzles immediately after each other, and its
wordlist was unfiltered.[17] Initially, 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.[22] After finishing the prototype around 2014, Wardle had lost interest and set
the prototype aside.[22]
In the intermediate time, Wardle created the two online social experiments The
Button and Place when working for Reddit.[12][22] When the COVID-19 pandemic struct, he
and his partner "got really into" The New York Times' Spelling Bee and daily crossword
puzzle.[12][17] 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.[12] Later he shared it with his relatives, where
it "rapidly became an obsession" with them. [12][22] 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.[22] In one case, he found that the game had
become popular with a group in New Zealand where they had created the emoji-style
display of the guesses which they shared with friends, which inspired Wardle to
incorporate this feature into game. [24][17] After adding this feature, the game became a viral
phenomenon on Twitter in late December 2021..[25][2][26]
Over 300,000 people played Wordle on January 2, 2022, up from 90 players on
November 1, 2021,[12] a figure that rose to over 2 million a week later. [27] Between January
1 and 13, 1.2 million Wordle results were shared on Twitter.[24] Several media outlets,
including CNET and The Indian Express, attributed the game's popularity to the
dailiness of the puzzles.[28][2] 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. [12] 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. [17] 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."[29][23] 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.[30]
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.[31][32] 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. [33][34]
Google created a special Google Doodle when one searches for "Wordle", with the
site's logo becoming an animated game of Wordle to find the word "Google".
[35]
 Twitter took action to block an auto-reply bot that replied to any Wordle result post
with the next day's word to prevent players from being spoiled. [36]
On January 31, 2022, The New York Times Company, the parent of The New York
Times, acquired Wordle from Wardle for an "undisclosed price in the low-seven
figures."[37] According to Wardle, the sudden attention he and his partner had gotten over
the previous few months had made them uncomfortable, and also 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. [22] 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.[37][38][39] Fans expressed worries that the acquisition meant the game
would eventually be put behind a paywall.[40] As the game operates entirely using client-
side 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.[41][42]
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.[43] 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" as
to "keep the puzzle accessible to more people", as well as eliminated some of the
British spelling variants in the solutions.[44] Players also found that the Times altered the
solution order so that the Times version of Wordle was out of synchronization with
cached or saved versions of Wordle, making it difficult for players to compare their
solution scores.[44]
Adaptations and clones
Following Wordle's sudden rise in popularity at the start of 2022, a number
of clones appeared. Some of these clones revised the Wordle formula in novel
methods. Absurdle is an adversarial version of Wordle where the target word changes
with each guess, while still staying true to previously revealed hints. [45] Other clones
include one that uses only four-letter swear words as its vocabulary pool, and one that
lets players change the word length. [46][47] In addition to similar games that don't involve
words such as a version where the user attempts to guess a country. [48][49] A number of
ad-supported clones appeared on Apple's App Store in early January 2022, but did little
to alter the formula, even borrowing the game's name. [50] Users continued to seek out
other Wordle clones on the App Store, and by the end of January 11, nearly all of the
clones had been removed from the store. [51] The New York Times filed
a trademark for Wordle shortly after acquiring it to help protect the intellectual property.
[52]

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 a larger array of character sets, making it amenable to a larger set of languages.
[53]
 By the start of February 2022, at least 350 different variants of Wordle had been
documented on the website "Wordles of the World". These include at least 91 versions
based on real languages, including historical and regional dialects of some languages,
and indigenous languages, and including other atypical uses of the Wordle formula for
symbolic languages such as Chinese chengyu and American sign language, and for
fictional languages such as Klingon.[54][55]
Languages
Languages that Wordle has been adapted into include:

 Arabic[56]
 Armenian and Western Armenian[57]
 Basque[58]
 Belarusian[59]
 Bengali[60]
 Cantonese[61][62]
 Catalan[63]
 Chinese[64]
 Croatian[65]
 Czech[66]
 Danish[67]
 Dutch[68]
 Esperanto[69]
 Filipino[70]
 Finnish[71]
 French[72][73]
 Galician[63]
 German[74][75]
 Gitxsan[76]
 Greek[77]
 Hawaiian[78]
 Hebrew[72][79]
 Hungarian[80]
 Icelandic[81]
 Indonesian[82][83]
 Iñupiaq[84]
 Irish[85]
 Italian[86]
 Japanese[87][88]
 Malaysian[89]
 Māori[90]
 Marathi[91]
 Norwegian[92]
 Occitan[93]
 Polish[94]
 Portuguese[95][96]
 Romanian[97]
 Russian[98][99]
 Saanich[76]
 Serbian[100]
 Slovenian[101]
 Spanish[63][102]
 Swedish[103]
 Tamil[95]
 Turkish[95]
 Ukrainian[104]
 Urdu[95]
 Welsh[105][106]
 Y