Lamps? . . . Legal? . . . Large!

Wordle, the latest online trend, has taken the internet by storm in the past several weeks.

The game is simple: each day, there’s a “wordle,” a five-letter word that players must determine within six guesses.

You begin with any five-letter word and hit enter. The screen will light up each letter with either green, yellow, or grey. A grey letter means that it is not in the word at all. Yellow means that the letter is in the word, but not in the correct placement. Green means the letter is in the correct placement.

Wordle debuted in October 2021 created by software engineer Josh Wardle, Wordle being a play on his last name. Wardle is from South Wales, Great Britain, and was brought up on an organic livestock farm. He attended university at Royal Holloway, University of London for a degree in Media Arts and also earned a Master’s degree for digital art at the University of Oregon.

Wardle created the prototype of Wordle in 2013 while he was working for Reddit, but he didn’t share it with anyone. In January 2021, he created the version of Wordle that we all know and love for his partner, Palak Shah. She helped with Wordle’s creation reviewing 12,000 five-letter words and narrowing it down to 2,500 well-known words that are used in the daily puzzle.

Initially, Wordle was used only by Wardle’s family until October, when it was made widely available.

Despite the popularity of the game, Wardle’s intention was not to make money. The game had around 100 players by November, growing to 300,000 daily players three months later, and rising to two million by the following week.

In January, the New York Times Company purchased Wordle for “an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures.”

Some players have noticed that the daily words have become more difficult since the change in ownership. However, the soul of Wordle has remained the same, a simple and fun competition meant to be shared among friends.

The game is found on the New York Times web site: www.nytimes.com.