In a new year borne out by provincial restrictions and new COVID variants alike, one of 2022’s hottest trends is unsurprisingly tame—but it is addictive.
Wordle, a free web-based word game invented by software engineer Josh Wardle, blew up exponentially in December through word of mouth—two months after its public release—when players started sharing and comparing their game results on Twitter (its title is a play on its inventor’s last name).
The game requires players to guess a five-letter word in six attempts. Users are not time-restricted, and the website provides feedback in the form of coloured tiles. A green tile means a correct letter in the correct spot. A yellow tile means right letter, wrong spot. And a dreaded grey tile means the letter isn’t included in the day’s word at all. Every player gets the same daily word and success is determined by how many tries it takes someone to guess the correct word, adding competitive weight to the game, given it can only be played once a day.
Wordle doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s certainly built a following: millions play the game daily, and on January 31, the New York Times purchased it for a price in the low seven figures.
It’s grassroots, too, with a charming origin story that helped to insulate the community of early users: Wardle created the game for his partner based on her love of word games (this makes the New York Times’ purchase all the more appropriate, given the widespread popularity of the publication’s crosswords and Spelling Bee game).
While creating the game, Wardle asked his partner, Palak Shah, to go through a series of five-letter words and pick out the ones she knew. As a result, far too often, I find myself actively cursing out Shah for knowing so many niche words whenever I get stuck on the game.
Playing Wordle doesn’t seem to require much skill, but users still seem to view it as an indicator of intelligence or ability. Sharing how many tries the daily word took you to solve has become an exercise in pride.
At first, the game felt like an insiders’ discovery—I first discovered it at the end of December after wondering why so many people I followed on Twitter were posting obscure blocks of coloured emoji tiles labelled with something like “4/6.”
Now, several people I know have Wordle group chats with memberships numbering into the double-digits, where they compare scores and gripe about the frustrations of the day’s word. TikTok is filled with hacks about how to use a statistically strong first word, and Twitter is a battle zone of coloured squares (while writing this article, I paused for a social-media scrolling break and the first Instagram story I clicked was an acquaintance polling her followers about their strategy for picking the first word they guess with).
The game socially represents this point in the pandemic: We’re exhausted by ever-changing rules and norms, craving stability and unity. This is exactly why the game’s community feels particularly generous and welcoming—the most consistently unified unspoken rule I’ve seen online since March 2020 is that nobody has ever spoiled a word for me online.
At this point, given how obsessed our culture is with binging media as a source of comfort and relief, I’m convinced that limiting the game’s plays to once per day is exactly what encourages people to come back over and over again. And while I’ve seen some TikTok users say they manipulate settings by changing the date on their devices to get the next day’s word early, there’s no fun in that sort of trickery.
An overwhelming aspect of the game’s fun is the sense of community you feel, knowing you’re guessing the same word (and making the same mistakes) as every other player in the world. And God forbid if you try to help someone out with a word you’ve already guessed by giving them tips—I almost started another world war by attempting to help my frustrated boyfriend with his guesses recently.
Wordle is low-stimulus: It has no advertisements and doesn’t require a subscription or an account. At the same time, the word game allows us to connect with one another in a low-stakes, low-commitment manner, no matter how drained we are by social interaction on any given day. It’s the perfect pandemic distraction.
In another world, every word in this article would have been five letters long to pay homage to Wordle’s perfection. Until that’s possible, I have just one constructive critique for its creator: Josh Wardle, it’s an absolute travesty that the game title isn’t five letters long.