The clever puzzle is taking the internet by storm. What is Wordle and who is behind its success?

Have you come across the (quite strange) name “Wordle” on the internet recently? Or maybe you have seen mysterious tables filled with gray, yellow and green squares on social networks? If so, you are not the only one. The Internet, and Twitter in particular, has recently been flooded by a huge wave of posts with Wordle scores.

This is a British online game that has just become a giant hit in Europe and the USA by a strange coincidence. Suffice it to say that the largest and most prestigious newspapers are writing about it, such as “”, “”, “” or “”, and there are more and more new puzzles inspired by the original. We explain what Wordle is all about and who is behind its success.

What is Wordle?

It’s a simple word-guessing game. Each word is five letters long and the player has six chances. And that’s it. Without any hints at the start, the player must guess what word the puzzle creators mean. So how do you do it in a maximum of six tries?

Wordle game manual photo: screenshot from the website powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle / Wordle

The rule is simple. We enter any five-letter word, and the system suggests which letters are present in the searched word. Those letters that appear elsewhere in the target word (e.g., not as the third, but as the first letter) are highlighted in yellow, and those that appear correctly in green. All other letters are gray.

It is important that the first words found differ as much as possible, and that each subsequent word does not contain (or has as few as possible) letters already marked in gray. This is an example of a Wordle game:

Sample Wordle game photo: screenshot from the website powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle / Wordle

The results of the game can of course be easily shared on Twitter, which players are very happy to use. This is why the social network was flooded with a wave of tables filled with gray, yellow and green squares, which show how many attempts the player managed to guess the password. The game is available (at least for now) only in a web browser ().

It was supposed to be a gift, it is a hit on the Internet

Wordle’s story is as surprising as the ingenuity shown by the author of the puzzle. Its creator is a programmer based in New York, Josh Wardle, and it was the combination of this name with the word “word” that gave the name of the game. Wardle created a game as a gift for his partner, who is a lover of puzzles.

Like, in the first few months Josh Wardle only played Wordle with his partner. The game helped them kill the time they spent at home during the pandemic restrictions introduced in the US. Later, Wardle sent the game to his family and shared the results with them via WhatsApp.

The extremely positive reception of Wordle made the creator decide to share it with his friends. The effect was similar, and Wardle eventually felt he could release the game to the public. It also happened, but – as the journal describes – the game did not become so popular right away. On November 1, only 90 people played it.

Wordle only became a viral after adding a button to share the result on Twitter. The ability to quickly and easily show off the result on the social networking site made the game gaining fans en masse. After two months, on January 2 this year. 300 thousand people played in Wordle. people – says “NYT”. And the popularity of the puzzle continues to grow, which is why the number of players is probably much higher today.

Interestingly, Josh Wardle invented a similar game in 2013, but his friends were not interested in it at all. So he abandoned the idea for many years, and only the new game based on the old idea turned out to be a huge hit.

In the creator, Wordle points out that he created the game for fun and does not intend to commercialize it. He declares that he wants the game to remain free and available to everyone. – I don’t understand why something can’t be just funny. I don’t have to charge people for money, and I wish it would stay that way, ‘he said.

Polish versions of Wordle have also already been created

Of course, to play Wordle, you need at least basic knowledge of English, because the game is only available in Shakespeare. We need a word resource in which we can find two, three or four different words consisting of five letters, and then we will match the next ones to the already known letters.

Luckily for people who prefer to play in their native language, similar puzzles have already been created, in which we can also guess Polish words. The most popular one with us is Literally, which looks and works almost the same as Wordle. It was created by Polish students who directly admit that they were inspired by the English-language original.

Literally game photo: screenshot with literally.fan