Wordle, a simple, shareable, and completely free word-guessing game, has suddenly gained a lot of traction on Twitter of late. The rules of the game — a brainteaser — are simple: players have to guess a five-letter word by entering characters in boxes. They can see which letters they got right or wrong through colour coding. If the letter from their guess isn't in the target word, that letter turns grey. It will turn yellow, if it is in the word but in the wrong position. It will become green if it is in the correct word and location. Players have six chances to get it right.
Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, designed the game for his partner, Palak Shah, who enjoyed word games, stated a report in The New York Times. As a result, he devised a unique guessing game for the two of them. Mr Wardle called the game Wordle as a play on his surname.
Mr Wardle thought he might be onto something after he and his partner played the game for a couple of months. Then he introduced it to his relatives on their family's WhatsApp group. There too became an obsession. Finally, he released it globally in October 2021.
Here's are a few examples of the game's popularity on Twitter:
I regret finding Wordle because it's going to bother me daily
— Paige Burton (@Paige_Burton) December 22, 2021
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜????⬜????????
????????????????????
Wordle 185 3/6
????????????????????
— casey briggs (@CaseyBriggs) December 22, 2021
Wordle 186 1/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
— Patrick Lum (@jintor_au) December 19, 2021
⬜????⬜????⬜
⬜⬜????????⬜
????????????????????
Wordle 183 4/6
From the tweets, a person can see how many guesses a player took, or which letters they got wrong or right. There is only one puzzle accessible every day for everyone. After you finish one, you must wait for the next day.
The New York Times report states that 90 people played the game on November 1, 2021. From there, it saw a meteoric rise, with over 3 lakh people playing the game on January 2, 2022.
According to a report in The Guardian, Mr Wardle, who worked at Reddit, has also created other “interesting experiments” on the platform, such as ‘The Button' and ‘Place'.
Mr Wardle had initially made a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends weren't thrilled, so he abandoned it. However, in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, he and Ms Shah “got really into” spelling bee and the daily crossword in The New York Times. That's when he got the idea of devising a game that she'd love.
In mid-December 2021, after Mr Wardle tweaked the game to allow players to share their results online, its popularity exploded. However, the results were spoiler-free because the players couldn't share their answers.
Though Wordle is Mr Wardle's gift to the world, for Ms Shah, this was a “sweet” gesture. The fact that he created the game specifically for her was “definitely how Josh shows his love”.
