Wordle

Every day, a new five-letter word is chosen, and players attempt to guess it within six tries. After each guess, the letters are color-coded based on their accuracy: • Green indicates a correct letter in the correct spot. • Yellow signifies that the letter is correct but in the wrong spot. • Gray means the word doesn't contain that letter in any spot. If a guessed word contains multiple instances of the same letter—such as the "o"s in "robot"—those letters will be marked green or yellow only if the answer also contains them multiple times. If not, extra occurrences will be marked gray. Each day's answer is drawn from a curated list of 2,309 words. and it has a "hard mode" option, which requires players to use any revealed green or yellow letters in subsequent guesses. The daily word is the same for all players worldwide. Additionally, the game offers both a dark theme and a high-contrast mode for colorblind accessibility, replacing the standard green and yellow color scheme with orange and blue. Conceptually and stylistically, the game is similar to the 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the game show franchise Lingo. The gameplay is also similar to the two-player Word Mastermind variety of the board game Mastermind—and the game "Bulls and cows", with the exception that Wordle confirms the specific letters that are correct. According to data collected by The New York Times, the most common first guesses are "adieu", "audio", "stare", "raise", and "arise". However, it was found that starting words such as "adieu" and "audio" may put people at a disadvantage as it takes more attempts for people to solve than if they start with words such as "slate", "crane", and "trace". Computer algorithms can consistently solve the puzzle within five of the six allowed guesses. ==History==

Early development In 2013, Josh Wardle created an early prototype of Wordle, initially calling it ''Mr. Bugs' Wordy Nugz. Inspired by the color-matching mechanics of the board game Mastermind, the prototype allowed players to solve puzzles consecutively. This reignited his interest in Wordle'', and he drew inspiration from Spelling Bee's minimalist web design and its one-puzzle-per-day format. By January 2021, Wardle had published Wordle on the web, shared only with himself and his partner. He named it Wordle as a pun on his surname. Subsequently, the game's player base rose greatly: from 90 players on November 1, 2021, to over 300,000 by January 2, 2022, Between January 1 and 13, 1.2 million Wordle results were shared on Twitter. Separately, a completely unrelated game called Wordle! by Steven Cravotta—released on the App Store five years before Wardle's Wordle—experienced a surge in downloads due to name confusion. Between January 5 and 12, 2022, Cravotta's game was downloaded over 200,000 times. Recognizing that many users mistakenly believed it to be Wardle's game, Cravotta partnered with Wardle to donate $50,000 in proceeds to Boost, a tutoring charity for Oakland schoolchildren. Google Search also created an Easter egg when one searches for "Wordle", with the site's logo becoming an animated game of Wordle to find the word "Google". To prevent spoilers, Twitter blocked an auto-reply bot that had been posting the next day's answer in response to players' results. Acquisition by the New York Times Company On January 31, 2022, the New York Times Company, the parent company of the New York Times, acquired Wordle from Wardle for an "undisclosed price in the low-seven figures". Vanity Fair reported that the New York Times narrowly outbid The Washington Post to acquire the game. However, fans worried that Wordle would eventually be placed behind a paywall. Due to these concerns, some players downloaded the webpage to preserve offline access, as Wordle operates entirely through client-side JavaScript. On February 10, Wordle officially moved to The New York Times website, with player statistics carried over. However, some users reported that their daily streaks had reset after the transition. To integrate the game into the New York Times online platform, developers rebuilt it using React and introduced New York Times account login support as another way to track progress. By July 2022, a total of seven words had been removed from the original 2,315 Wordle answers, causing the New York Times version to become unsynchronized with older, cached versions of the game. This discrepancy made it difficult for players using different versions to compare scores. On August 24, 2022, Wordle was added to The New York Times Crossword app, with progress synced across mobile and desktop versions, and on April 7, 2022, WordleBot was launched by the New York Times to give players information about how they completed their Wordle on that day, giving a luck and skill rating. According to the New York Times quarterly earnings report ending on March 31, 2022, the acquisition of Wordle brought "tens of millions" of new players to the New York Times puzzle site and app, many of whom continued to play the other puzzles offered by the New York Times. Editors in the New York Times games department called the following months the "Hot Wordle Summer" due to further increases in players on their games app resulting from Wordle. Editor was appointed to edit Wordle. In November 2022, The New York Times appointed Tracy Bennett as Wordles dedicated editor, responsible for selecting the daily word from a curated list. Speaking to Today in January 2023, she explained that while the words are initially chosen at random, she reviews each selection for suitability. She removes words that have secondary meanings that could be considered profane or derogatory, as well as those that might be unintentionally hurtful or insensitive. The most frequent player complaints, she noted, stemmed from unfamiliar words, "parer", "rupee" and the U.S.-specific "condo". Bennett also introduced a new editorial approach by occasionally aligning the daily word with significant dates. For example, "BEGIN" was chosen on her first day as editor, "MEDAL" appeared on Veterans Day (November 11), and "FEAST" was selected for Thanksgiving (November 24). This thematic connection was not part of Wardle's original word list. Usage In 2022, Wordle was the most-searched term on Google worldwide and in the United States. The game's popularity also influenced Google search trends, as players frequently looked up the definitions of daily answers. Seven of the top ten most-searched word definitions that year—cacao, homer, canny, foray, trove, sauté, and tacit—were all Wordle solutions. At the March 2023 Game Developers Conference, New York Times producer Zoe Bell shared insights into Wordles lasting impact on the company's other online games. While Wordles player count peaked in March 2022 and later declined, it remained stable at about half of that peak a year later. More significantly, Wordles popularity has driven increased engagement with other New York Times games, with daily player numbers continuing to rise as of March 2023. In 2025, Pope Leo XIV was reported to be a daily Wordle player. == Reception and legacy ==

Critical reception Wordle has garnered generally positive reviews. The Guardian gave it five out of five stars, lauding it as "a five-minute conundrum that slots pleasingly into even the most harried routine" and likening it to a daily newspaper puzzle. PC Gamer rated it 80/100 and described it as "a fantastic, mesmerizing daily puzzle that's bundled to a community offering some of the best vibes on the internet". Charlie Hall of Polygon criticized the game's board game adaptation, describing it as a "cut-and-paste job" that simply replicated the digital game's mechanics without adding meaningful enhancements for a multiplayer party setting. Adaptations and clones Following Wordles rapid rise in early 2022, numerous clones emerged, some introducing novel twists to the game's logic. Absurdle, created by British programmer qntm, is an adversarial version where the target word changes after each guess while still adhering to previously revealed hints. Other clones retained Wordle mechanics but altered the word list, including translations into other languages and themed variations such as Sweardle (featuring swear words) and Weddle (focused on NFL players, named after former safety Eric Weddle). The game has also been ported to older hardware, with versions like GameBoy Wordle for the Game Boy and Wordle DS for the Nintendo 3DS. Beyond direct clones, many other games adopted the "-le" suffix to signal a connection to Wordle, even with significant gameplay differences. These include Semantle, where players guess words based on semantic similarity, and Squabble, a Wordle battle royale. The game's success also spurred a wave of non-word-based variations, such as Worldle, where players identify a country or territory by its silhouette, with text hints indicating direction and distance from the correct answer; Heardle, a music-identification game acquired by Spotify in July 2022; Poeltl (named after NBA player Jakob Pöltl), where players guess an NBA player based on seven characteristics with color-coded feedback similar to Wordle; and Globle, where players guess a country on a map where guesses are colored based on the distance from the correct answer. Some variants expanded Wordle's challenge by requiring players to solve multiple puzzles at once, such as Quordle, which involves solving four puzzles simultaneously and was acquired by Merriam-Webster in January 2023. A wave of ad-supported Wordle clones also appeared on Apple's App Store in early January 2022, often using the same name while making minimal changes to the gameplay. However, by the end of the month, nearly all of these clones had been removed. After acquiring Wordle, The New York Times moved to protect its intellectual property by filing a trademark application for the game's name and issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against GitHub repositories hosting clone source code. The New York Times also initiated legal action against Worldle, a location-based guessing game using a similar format, alleging trademark infringement. The developer of Worldle stated they would contest the claim. Others After Wordle gained viral popularity among English-speaking users in January 2022, it was quickly adapted into numerous other languages. An open-source version of the game, created by Hannah Park, was modified by linguist Aiden Pine to accommodate different character sets, enabling broader linguistic accessibility. Pine also published a free step-by-step blog on how to create a custom Wordle. By February 2022, the collaborative project Wordles of the World had documented 350 Wordle-inspired games and resources across several languages. These include adaptations in historical and regional dialects, indigenous languages, and languages without alphabetic writing systems (such as Chinese chengyu and American Sign Language). The Brazilian version of the game was developed by Google engineer Fernando Serboncini under the title Termo. Originally from São Paulo and based in Canada, Serboncini had previously created games in 2012 and 2015, before beginning to release one title per year from 2018 to 2020, two in 2021, and eventually Termo in 2022. It was launched on January 5, 2022, and reached 100,000 daily players within ten days of release. The sudden growth caused the game's server to crash, leading Serboncini to migrate it to a system with four times the previous capacity. The game has also achieved popularity in Portugal. == See also ==