The Worldwide Wordle Craze, Explained

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The seemingly simple online word game, “Wordle,” has taken the internet by storm and was recently purchased by The New York Times (‘NYT’). 

“Wordle” was released in October 2021. It had 90 daily players at the start of November. Since then, the game has grown to have millions. Through its rise to popularity, the game’s colourful squares representing letter tiles have flooded social media feeds.

The objective is to guess the five-letter “word of the day” in six attempts. On the first try, you enter any five-letter word. Based on what colour the tiles turn, players will know if the letters are present in the final answer.

The tile turns green if the letter has been guessed in the right spot, yellow if the letter is in the word but not in the correct space, and gray if that letter does not appear in the word at all. The site keeps track of the number of attempts each time the game has been successfully completed and each user’s “streak” of how many days in a row they have solved the puzzle. 

The game was created by Josh Wardle, a British software engineer and digital arts graduate of the University of Oregon. 

Despite the game’s seemingly rapid rise to fame, Wardle had created the first prototype for “Wordle”  in 2013. He gave up on the project when his earlier prototype failed to challenge and entertain his friends. He revisited the project in 2020 for his partner, Palak Shah, who had become obsessed with word games, specifically those featured by the NYT. 

This isn’t the first time that Warlde has produced a viral game. Wardle created “The Button”, a social experiment that became popular on Reddit, as well as another social experiment called “Place”.

Recently “Wordle” was purchased by The New York Times for a price purportedly in the low seven figures.

Like many popular games, “Wordle” has had several copy-cats emerge. One of its imitations, “WhatWord-Wordle”, has reached 20,000 downloads worldwide and has become the top-ranked word game in the U.K., Ireland and Netherlands, as of January 8. 

Another “Wordle” imitation game called “Wordle!” reached 40,000 downloads and reached the fourth spot for word games in the U.S. in early January.

Apple had begun removing many imitation “Wordle” games from its App Store after they started to gain traction.

“Wordle” has received complaints from players since The New York Times assumed ownership. Players have noticed an increase in the difficulty of the words, and that their win streaks from previous games have been lost.

Despite the preservation of players’ win-streaks being promised when the launch was announced, the NYT found that they were being reset after successfully completing the “Worlde” the day of the launch. 

The New York Times has since been able to restore streaks for those who had lost theirs. However, players had to successfully complete the next day’s “Wordle” and refresh their browser in order to recover the data.

The NYT believes that the vast majority of “Wordle” players’ statistics should have now been transferred successfully. However, some players reportedly are still experiencing this issue.