Wordle is a browser-based word guessing game created by Josh Wardlefun fact released in October 2021.
The gameplay is familiar to anyone with a knowledge of Mastermind or Lingo: you have six attempts to guess a five-letter word in English. After entering a guess, the game will indicate which letters in your guess, if any, are in the word and whether they're in the correct positions. The game will not accept random letter strings (no typing in something like "ETAOI"). At the end of the game, a dialogue box pops up showing your statistics, a timer until the next puzzle, and a Share button where you can copy your completed board in emoji format to post somewhere. Each day brings a new word to guess, and puzzles cannot be replayed.
On January 31, 2022, The New York Times Company purchased the game for "an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures." They plan to keep it initially available for free to all players with no changes on the gameplay. In April that year, a tool called WordleBot
was released. It solves each day's Wordle, analyzes the player's completed board, and provides some information about a sample of other players' Wordles such as average number of attempts to guess the word.
Wordle can be found here.
Not to be confused with Yordle.
Tropes
- Anti-Frustration Features: While letters toggle the appropriate color on the board, there's also a keyboard below your guesses which shows each letter of the alphabet. The corresponding key on the keyboard also turns green, yellow, or grey if you've used it before.
- Colorblind Mode: The toggle can be found in the options, which turns green tiles (and the option toggles) orange and yellow tiles light blue. When shared, the normally green and yellow square emojis will also be orange and blue.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: After entering a word, the game will turn each letter tile green, yellow, or grey. Green means the letter is in the correct spot. Yellow means the word contains that letter, but it's currently in the wrong spot. Grey means the letter is not in the word at all.
- Difficulty Levels: In regular gameplay, there are no restrictions to the words you can play in each attempt. When "Hard Mode" is toggled, you have to use at least one letter from a previous guess in your next guesses.
- Gameplay Grading: Winning a puzzle triggers a different message depending on how many guesses it took, with the sixth guess getting it right being "Phew".
- Gray Is Useless: Letters that are not in the word will turn grey after the player attempts to use them.
- Luck-Based Mission:
- Trying to get the Wordle on the first try is a pure guess, as you have absolutely no information to help eliminate possibilities.
- It's possible to end up with only one letter missing, but with multiple valid guesses for that missing letter (for example, if you have "SHA_E", the missing letter could be a D, K, L, M, P, R, or V). If you end up in such a situation on your last guess, the only thing you can do is try to deduce which words are more likely to be today's word, and hope you guess right.
- New Content Countdown Clock: When the day's puzzle is finished, a timer on the last page of the WordleBot analysis shows the number of hours, minutes, and seconds until the next Wordle. It is based on the player's local time zone.
- Orange/Blue Contrast: High contrast mode substitutes orange and blue for green and yellow.
- Play Every Day: The game encourages you to guess the daily word, as it constantly changes. The next puzzle is given out at midnight in your local timezone. It also keeps track of your streak — how many days in a row you have solved the puzzle.
- Portmantitle: A combination (or pun) using "Word" and the dev's name, "Wardle".
- Thanksgiving Episode: The Wordle for Thanksgiving day in 2022 was FEAST.
- Tin-Can Robot: WordleBot, which solves the day's Wordle and comments on the player's gameplay, is a light gray box with a pair of legs and a "face" that consists of a blinking display and three knobs.
