Wild About Wordle
/I love word games. I always have. I played Scrabble and Hangman as a kid. Lin and I play Speed Scrabble whenever we get together. Speed Scrabble is a nerve-wracking, high-energy game. We make up our own rules as we go along and we both love it. While I was overseas sailing on Nine of Cups, Lin and I frequently played Words With Friends… a half world away. Now each morning when David and I finish reading the NY Times, we immediately head to the games… Spelling Bee, Mini Crossword and Wordle. We save Wordle for last because it’s our favorite. It’s the only game we play separately. We’re not really competitive (but we like to win). 😉
When Welsh software engineer, Josh Wardle, created the word game Wordle for his wordgame-loving partner, Palak Shah, I doubt he realized it’d be such a hit. When he first developed the prototype in 2013, it got a lukewarm reception from his partner and friends and he put it aside for a few years. When the pandemic hit, Wardle and Shah began playing the NYT’s Spelling Bee and daily crossword and it inspired him to resurrect his original word game and improve it. For instance, at first his word game used 13,000 possible 5-letter words, many of which were unfamiliar to Shah. Whittling the list down to about 2000 more common words made solving the game much more achievable. Words like craic and soare were eliminated (thank goodness!).
Josh Wardle created Wordle for his partner, Palak Shah. Photo credit: MSNEWS
During the pandemic, Wardle and Shah played NY Times word games, Spelling Bee and the daily crossword, religiously. The newfound free time he now had also reignited his interest in finishing his original word game, which he named Wordle… an obvious play on his surname. His goal was to develop a simple-to-use website design for the puzzle while limiting play to one puzzle per day. According to an interview with the BBC, "Wordle is very simple and you can play it in three minutes — and that is all you get," Wardle said in his BBC interview. "There are also no ads and I am not doing anything with your data — and that is also quite deliberate." He was quite adamant that folks not waste time playing Wordle all day.
According to Statistica Infographtics, “The game had 90 players by 1 November, within a month of Wardle making it public. One month later the game had 300,000 daily players, which rose to two million by the following week.”
“ In January 2022, the New York Times acquired Wordle from Wardle for an "undisclosed price in the low-seven figures." As of December 2022, Wordle had around 3 million players worldwide, but the number is declining. Some speculate it’s because the NY Times bought the game and players thought it would drastically change it… which it didn’t. According to my research, The NY Times “said it eliminated words it found to be too difficult. It didn't say which ones, but they include "pupal," and "fibre"... It also removed words considered to be rude or offensive from the list of solutions. ( [Again] it didn't say which of these were taken out, but they include "wench" and "slave.") The NYT also added the Wordle Bot which we use to analyze our plays each morning. Sometimes we’re absolutely brilliant… other times, not so much.
Another reason for the apparent decline seems to be knockoffs that have popped up and can be played more than once per day.
Wordle – 6 guesses to guess 1 word/ play only once per day
versus these unlimited games, e.g.
Quordle - 9 guesses to guess 4 words
Octordle – 13 guesses to guess 8 words
Absurdle – Unlimited guesses
and many, many more options.
Though only one Wordle game is available per day, the Wordle Archive website which was launched by designer Devang Thakkar, features all the previous Wordles that have been shared so people can attempt to solve them over and over again. The NYT has pressured Wordle Archiver to shut down, and though Thakkar did comply, the website lives on. I played Wordle #1 the other day.
No spoiler alert. You can play it if you check out the Wordle Archive website above.
Some Wordle factoids:
According to data collected by The New York Times, the most common first guesses are "adieu", "audio", "stare", "raise", and "arise".
Plurals ending in ‘s’ and ‘es’ are not used in Wordle
Wordle uses American spelling despite the fact that Wardle hails from Wales, but he’s actually lived in the USA for more than a decade, having received his MFA degree from the University of Oregon in 2011. Players outside the US have complained that this spelling convention gives American players an unfair advantage. For example, in the case of the solution "favor” vs. the UK spelling ‘favour’ which wouldn’t be eligible for Wordle at all in the UK since it’s a 6-letter word. Oh, well.
Wordle has 2,308 possible answers and 12,545 allowed guesses.
The global average for solving Wordle is 4.016 guesses, with Sweden being the best country (3.72) and Egypt the worst (4.42).
So, do you play Wordle? Have you tried any of the other knockoffs?