What is Wordle? Why is it popular on Twitter? Everything you need to know about the online word game

Wordle is the new trending feature on Twitter - so what is it and why is it so popular?
Wordle.Wordle.
Wordle.

Wordle has taken over Twitter, with more than 300,000 people using the app on January 2, 2022.

It has now been bought by the New York Times for an undisclosed seven-figure sum.

What is Wordle?

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Wordle is a word game app. It is made up of a block of 30 squares with a letter keyboard at the bottom.

With a maximum of six tries, the aim of the game is to guess what the word is by typing in five-letter words into the block. Once you’ve hit Enter, the letters which are correctly guessed and positioned, will turn green; the letters which are guessed correctly, but are not in the correct position, will turn yellow; and the letters which are incorrect, will turn grey.

The trick is to keep in mind vowels and consonants and to guess the correct word by your sixth try.

You can only play one game per day. Each daily game uses a randomly selected word from a list of 2,500 words, selected from the full list of 12,000 five-letter words in English.

Who created Wordle?

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The online word game was developed by Brooklyn programmer, Josh Wardle, who had previously created the social experiments Place and The Button for Reddit.

Mr Wardle had initially created the game for himself and his partner, Palak Shah, to play together. He made the game public in mid-October 2021 after his relatives became addicted to it.

He named the game Wordle which is a pun based on his surname and said that he has no intention of profiting off of it.

Why are people tweeting about it?

The game allows you to share your results with your followers on Twitter and as such, it went viral on the social media platform in late December 2021.

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Many news outlets suggested that the popularity of the game comes from the rule of only having one puzzle per day.

Mr Wardle himself believes that this created a sense of scarcity, which leaves the players eager to play more; he also mentioned that this encourages players to spend only three minutes at a time on the game.

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