Wordle

Wordle is a daily word puzzle where the player has six attempts to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, the game provides color-coded feedback: green indicates a correct letter in the correct position, yellow indicates a correct letter in the wrong position, and gray indicates a letter not in the word at all. Using this feedback, the player narrows down the possibilities with each successive guess. The puzzle resets daily with a new word, and all players worldwide solve the same word each day.

Rules

1. The secret word is always exactly five letters long and is a common English word.
2. You have six guesses to find the word.
3. Each guess must be a valid five-letter English word.
4. After each guess, letters are color-coded:

• Green: The letter is in the word AND in the correct position.
• Yellow: The letter is in the word but in a WRONG position.
• Gray: The letter is NOT in the word at all.

1. If a letter appears multiple times in a guess but only once in the answer, only one instance will be colored green or yellow.
2. The game is won by guessing the word within six tries. There is no score — you either solve it or you do not.

Strategies

• Strong Opening Word: Choose a first guess rich in common letters. Popular openers include CRANE, SLATE, ADIEU, RAISE, and STARE. Ideally, your first word contains common vowels and consonants with no repeated letters.
• Maximize Information: In early guesses, prioritize covering as many different letters as possible rather than chasing the answer immediately.
• Use All Feedback: Track gray letters carefully — knowing which letters are NOT in the word is as valuable as knowing which are.
• Position Matters: A yellow letter tells you both that the letter IS in the word and that it is NOT in the position you tried. Use both pieces of information.
• Common Patterns: Think about frequent English letter combinations: TH, SH, CH, -IGHT, -OUND, -TION, consonant clusters, and double letters.
• Hard Mode Thinking: Even if not playing hard mode (where you must use all confirmed hints in subsequent guesses), doing so voluntarily often leads to faster solves by forcing logical deduction.

Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, a Welsh-born software engineer living in Brooklyn, New York. Wardle originally developed the game in 2013 for his partner, who loved word games, but shelved it. He revisited the project during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, refining the design by reducing the word list from over 12,000 possibilities to approximately 2,300 carefully curated common words, eliminating obscure or unpleasant terms.

Wardle released the game publicly on his personal website in October 2021. The game spread virally in late 2021 and early 2022, propelled by its elegant sharing mechanism: players could post their results as a grid of colored emoji squares on social media without spoiling the answer. This spoiler-free sharing format was a key innovation that fueled its explosive growth. By January 2022, the game had gone from 90 daily players to over 2 million.

On January 31, 2022, The New York Times purchased Wordle from Josh Wardle for an undisclosed sum reported to be in the "low seven figures." The game was moved to the Times website, where it joined the paper's existing puzzle portfolio alongside the crossword, Spelling Bee, and other word games. The Times kept the game free to play, though it was later incorporated into the NYT Games subscription bundle.

Wordle's cultural impact has been enormous. It spawned hundreds of variants and clones: Dordle (two words simultaneously), Quordle (four words), Absurdle (adversarial version), Nerdle (math equations), Worldle (geography), and versions in dozens of languages. Linguists and data scientists analyzed optimal strategies, information theory researchers calculated ideal opening words, and the game became a shared daily ritual for millions. Its design philosophy — one puzzle per day, no score, no ads, universally shared — represented a refreshing counter to the attention-maximizing design of most digital games.