Wordle is a daily word game you can find online here. It’s fun, simple and, like a crossword, can only be played once a day. Every 24 hours there’s a new word of the day, and it’s up to you to figure out what it is. The site itself does a fantastic job of explaining the rules:
Wordle game gives players six chances to guess a randomly selected five-letter word. As shown above, if you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot shows up yellow. A letter that isn’t in the word in any spot shows up gray.
You can enter a total of six words, meaning you can enter five burner words from which you can learn hints about the letters and their placements. Then you get one chance to put those hints to use. Or you can try for performance and guess the word of the day in three, two or even one go.
Tips and tricks
If you’re a word game purist, you may want to avoid the following tips and rely entirely on your own instincts. For everyone else who’s sick of seeing gray boxes, here are some tips that you may find helpful.
Choosing your first word: The first word is arguably the most important. To maximize the value of your opening gambit, choose a word with three vowels and five different letters. Some examples: orate, media, radio. I always use “adieu” for some reason. It’s a habit and I’m refusing to break it.
I just finished reading a fascinating piece by Tyler Glaiel, a programmer and game designer who tried to figure out the best possible starting word. Apparently we should all be kicking off Wordle with the word “roate.” Honestly, read this whole article, it’s great.
Avoid reusing grays: There’s a keyboard at the bottom of the Wordle board that shows what letters are green, yellow and gray. Avoid reusing letters that have come up gray. Yes, this sounds obvious. But it can take time and effort to think of five-letter words that don’t use letters you’ve already tried. That effort will pay off.
Letters can appear twice: This complicates matters, especially when you’re running out of letters to try on word four or five. But letters often recur, as with words like chill, sissy and ferry having been the correct answers in the past.
Who made Wordle?
Wordle is the work of software engineer Josh Wardle, who originally created the game for his partner, a fan of word games, and tells the BBC it will never become laden with ads. Extremely online people may remember Wardle as the creator of Place, an utterly wild collaborative art project/social experiment that sent the internet into a tizzy in April 2017.
Place was a shared online space that allowed literally anyone to fight over what was drawn there. It resulted in huge, sprawling communities battling over space on this gigantic online canvas.
