So, what is Wordle?
Wordle is a daily online word challenge in which players must guess a five letter word correctly. There is one challenge per day and everyone in the world gets the same one.
How to play:
You will encounter a 5 by 6 grid. This means that you have 6 opportunities to guess the five-letter word correctly. When you put in your first word and press enter, you will most likely see some of your letters turn either yellow or green. A green letter means that you have correctly guessed the letter and it is in the correct place as well. Yellow means that the letter appears somewhere in the word but the current placement is incorrect. Players use hints from the green and yellow boxes in order to guess the daily word. When all of the letters turn green, you have correctly guessed the word and can share your results with friends and family!
The goal is to guess the word in the least amount of attempts.
Why is it so great?
One of the things I like most about this game is that players can share their results without spoiling the game for others. The way that the share feature is designed makes it so that people can only see the color of the boxes and not the letters. Basically, your friends and family can see how many attempts you took without knowing the letters you used in your guesses.
Why was it created?
Wordle was created by a Brooklyn-based software engineer named Josh Wardle. According to the New York Times, Wardle created the game for his partner as a gift. The two had found a shared interest in word-based games during the pandemic, and his partner especially loved them. In an interview with Global News, Wardle revealed that he shared the game with friends and family through WhatsApp. The game only became publicly available in October 2021. On November 1, 90 people played the daily word game. At the time that the Global News article was written, January 14, 2022, 2.5 million people played the game per day.
Rise to Fame:
Wordle has become one of the most popular game-trends of the new year. Public figures openly share their love for it. On the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon did a segment in which he did the daily wordle challenge with his co-host Higgins and Roots drummer Quest Love. That video can be found here. It has also been the topic of discussion in news segments and analyzed in many YouTube videos.
