In recent weeks, a very simple online game in which you have to guess a word in English has begun to be part of the routine of many people, becoming viral on social networks. To play it as a non-native speaker you need a good knowledge of English, but there are those who are also passionate about it in Italy. The game is called Wordle and requires a minimum of logic but also a little luck; like other similar games it is also quite addictive, which made it popular rather quickly. Last November 1st, shortly after its launch, 90 people had played it: those who played it on January 2nd were 300 thousand, and those who did so in the last weekend were 2 million.
Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, a Welsh programmer who lives in New York, who played a pun with his surname to give it a name (“word” is the English term for “word”). It is similar to a popular game in the United States due to the Lingo TV show, which aired since the late 1980s. The goal is to guess a five-letter word in up to six attempts, starting with an existing word that you choose randomly and type on your keyboard.
Each time you make an attempt, the letter boxes are colored: gray if that letter is not present in the word to be guessed, yellow if it is present but in a different place, green if it is in the right place. The goal is, attempt after attempt, to go by exclusion and use the letters indicated as green and yellow to get to guess the right word, which is chosen at random among the 2,500 words of five most common English letters (out of about 12 thousand in total ). It is played online, for free and without registration, but only once a day, as the program sets a single word to guess every 24 hours. The main difficulty for those who do not have excellent English is to think of five-letter words of complete meaning to be used as attempts: but once you have done a little practice, you can use more or less always the same ones, mainly exploiting logic.
Wardle explained that he created the game for his partner, who like him is a fan of crosswords and games that have to do with words in general. At first it was born as a way to pass the time during the coronavirus pandemic, but then it became an obsession in his family's WhatsApp group, Wardle told the New York Times: so in mid-October he was convinced to share it. online.
Wordle had become more and more popular thanks to word of mouth. It had begun to spread even more in mid-December, thanks to the introduction of a new feature that allows you to share your attempts to guess the word – represented only by gray, yellow or green boxes – on social networks without revealing the final solution.
In the last few days the game has gone so viral that one person decided to create an app and upload it to the Apple App Store, immediately achieving huge success, but also attracting huge criticism for actually stealing the idea of the game from Wardle. .
Wordle 206 3/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
???????? ⬜ ???? ⬜
??????????????????? ? Always pleasing to get it in 3
– Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 11, 2022
According to Wardle, much of the success of his game depends on the fact that it is fun, requires little time and can only be done once a day; Furthermore, comparing your results with friends and family or on social networks is a way of keeping in touch with other people “without too much effort or conflict,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. In addition, being a project born for leisure, there are no frills or advertising or ulterior motives, and according to him this too is appreciated by those who play with it.
Since the word to guess is chosen at random from a program, he plays Wordle himself every day, and when he guesses he feels a certain sense of satisfaction, he feels “smart, which is something people like,” he says. “It's something that stimulates you to spend three minutes of your day and that's it, it doesn't ask you for more time”, he commented.
In addition to delighting word games, Wordle has also intrigued mathematicians and people who love this type of puzzle. One user shared an algorithm on Twitter that would help guess the word of the day in just a few moves, while another suggested typing the word “adieu” first to find or discard one or more of its four vowels. Tim Gowers, Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, says it's a good idea to start with two words that contain frequently used letters but don't have any in common.
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