If you’re anything like me, and you’re awake at 11:45 PM on any given night, you find something to do for the next fifteen minutes, and then you jump online.
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Because you can’t wait to play Wordle.
I heard about it through a friend, began playing, and was soon hooked. Now, I start my day with it whenever possible. I have a cadre of Facebook friends who post their game scores daily, and we all congratulate each other when we get the word – and commiserate with each other when we miss it. When I first played the game, I used random starter words because I didn’t know which might work. My favorite starter word is now a part of my daily Wordle ritual – and its result usually leads me to use a set “second word.”
The process of how – or if – a Wordle player chooses a starter word is as individual as their morning coffee order.
Wordle is the viral word game created and first posted online by Josh Wardle in October 2021. It proved to be an instant sensation, and in the subsequent months of 2022, tens of millions of people visited his site and attempted to guess a five-letter word. During its initial months, the solutions to the puzzle came directly from Josh. New York Times purchased the right to the game in January 2022, and suddenly, every Wordle lover had an account on the newspaper’s online website.
The Times did its best to generate even more popularity for the game by placing it on its news app and as its crossword app over the past summer. But, as of November 7, the word game acquired its own editor -Tracy Bennett. Bennett has been a puzzle editor for the Times since 2020, has been appointed as the editor of Wordle.
The game will use a word list created by the New York Times. The words will be taken from the standard dictionary. The times will program and test Wordle just as it does its daily Spelling Bee and Crossword. The rules and gameplay of Wordle will stay the same.
All the solutions to Wordle can be any five-letter word found in that basic dictionary – except for plurals to three- or four-letter words that would end in “s” or “es.” (For example, “boxes” or “lamps” will never be the answer. However, unique plurals such as “geese” or “fungi” would be allowed.
Although the solutions to the Wordle will all be taken from the basic dictionary, players will still be able to use any word found in a much larger list of valid “guess words.”
These contain some foreign and obscure words. As for now, Bennett has no plans to alter the game, and all of us who are up at midnight every night are very glad.