What Is Wordle? Word Game That Is Breaking The Internet. Know Its Origin Story

Wordle is a guessing game that roughly follows the rules of the guess-the-colour game Mastermind. People playing Wordle need to guess a mystery five-letter word in six attempts.

Wordle is a guessing game in which people need to guess a mystery five-letter word in six attempts | Photo: powelanguage.co.uk

New Delhi: People who have been active on social media in the past week or two are likely to have come across several posts depicting emoji boards or Tetris-like blocks made up of yellow, green, and grey squares. The post mentions two random numbers and the word, "Wordle".

It is actually a hit word game called Wordle, which is going viral over the internet. The multi-coloured squares being shared are the results.

Software engineer Josh Wardle from Brooklyn, New York, had created the daily word game for his partner, Palak Shah, who enjoys playing word games.
They played the game for months, which soon became a family favourite, according to a New York Times article. It rapidly became an obsession in his family's WhatsApp group once he introduced it to relatives. He subsequently decided to share his idea with the world. 

What Exactly Is Wordle?

Wordle is a guessing game that roughly follows the rules of the guess-the-colour game Mastermind, according to another New York Times report. One has to guess a five-letter word, after which the computer will tell which letters have been correctly guessed, and whether they are in the right place. A player gets six tries to figure it out. Also, there is only one word to guess per day. 
People need not download an app to play Wordle. The game can be played using a web browser. The game can be played using the following link: www.powerlanguage.co.uk. 
The number of persons playing Wordle has increased from dozens to hundreds of thousands in a few months. 
On November 1, as many as 90 people were playing the game. Wordle had more than 300,000 players by January 2, 2022. 

People can share their results using a share button on the game's website. This will generate a spoiler-free emoji grid, a tweet by the game's creator read.

Added a share button to Wordle that generates a spoiler-free emoji grid for you. Shoutout to @irihapeta for inventing such a cool way to share your results each day.

👇

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟨🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 180 3/6

Try it out: https://t.co/pZTmeT1p7E

— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) December 16, 2021

The original version of Worlde allows a player to guess only one word per day. However, due to the increasing popularity of the game, a software engineer has created a version of Wordle which does not have any limits.  

On November 29, 2021, Katherine Peterson, the techie, posted on Twitter that she had built the new version after her brother requested her to make one so he could play more than once a day. She also shared the link of the new version of the game she built. People who intend to guess more than one word each day can use the following link to play Wordle: https://octokatherine.github.io/word-master/.

My brother's been playing Wordle every day, and he asked me to build him a version that he could play more than once a day.

If anyone else wants to play:https://t.co/5bLn8kaIr7

— Katherine Peterson (@katherinecodes) December 29, 2021

How To Play Wordle?

People playing Wordle need to guess a mystery five-letter word in six attempts. The colours of the tiles change after each attempt, to reflect how close the player's guess was. A green tile indicates that the person not only guessed a correct letter, but also placed it at the correct position.

Steps To Play Wardle (Photo: powerlanguage.co.uk)

 

A yellow tile indicates that the letter is in the word but has been placed at the wrong position by the player. When a letter entered by the player is not present in the word, the tile turns grey.
People must play the first round by using certain vowels. For instance, most words have the letter E; so, people may use this letter in the first round. 
From the first five guesses, people may obtain hints about which letters are present in the mystery word, along with their positions, based on the colours of the tiles.

One of the reasons behind Wordle's increasing popularity is that every player guesses the same word on a particular day, which makes it interesting for people to share their results and see others' scores.
In an interview to the New York Times, Wardle said that people appreciate the fact that there is a thing online which is fun. He added that he is not trying to do anything shady with people's data or eyeballs. 

Wordle is serious business.https://t.co/8PAwjKgPF7 https://t.co/uOKgDCdLAC

— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) December 4, 2021

Wardle, formerly a software engineer for Reddit, had created two collaborative social experiments on the site, called The Button and Place. 
The most incredible thing about the game is that Wardle built Wordle without a team of engineers.
He had first created a similar prototype in 2013, but brushed off the idea after his friends were unimpressed, the NYT article said. In 2020, he and his partner got into Spelling Bee and the daily crossword, and came up with a game she would enjoy.
Wardle said that his partner played a key role in getting the game ready for the public. The initial list of all five-letter words in the English language contained several obscure words which may be very difficult to guess. Therefore, Wardle's partner sorted through those 12,000 words, and determined whether she knew them or not. As a result, the number of words was reduced to 2,500. Still, there were certain words such as REBUS and TAPIR, which some people were not familiar with, the NYT article said.