Why Wordle is the need of the hour

If you haven’t heard of the online word game Wordle, you’re definitely living on another planet.

This digital game, consisting of a grid of 30 tiles, 5 across and 6 down, offers a new 5-letter word every day to be strategically guessed.

You can start with your own choice of a 5 letter word and proceed along the colour coded maze — green for the right letter in the right place, yellow for a correct letter but in the wrong place and grey for a wrong letter. The catch?

Well, you only get five chances to try your luck and if you [luckily] get the right word in the morning, well, you have to wait for the next day for another challenge!

Wordle has been called a love story created by software engineer Josh Wardle for his wife who loves word games. The playful tweak of his name created an online sensation. First played by 90 people in November 2021, more than 3 million are known to have tried it by the beginning of the new year. So popular has it become that The New York Times has now bought it for a ‘low 7-digit figure’.

Why is it so popular? Not being an application but an online game, Wordle creates a serene space around it, away from the loud noises of advertisements, notifications, links for similar products and the endless pop-ups that are so common in all digital products.

Open Wordle online and you get an empty page with white and grey tiles. Like a colouring game with letters, the page begins to be filled in with green, yellow and grey tiles.

There is no hurry, the digital clock is not ticking to panic you, there are no enthusiastic ‘great!’ or commiserating ‘better luck next time’ banners at the bottom. It’s just you, and those tiles. You have the entire day to figure it out — you can come back online and bits of the word are still waiting. Do you really want to try out the fifth and last time? Maybe you want to wait awhile for inspiration to kick in.

And of course, the joy of actually getting it right — it just has to be shared. Wordle configurations now allow for the completed tiles (with the final word hidden) to be shared on social media, giving just that bit of punch to those who want to gloat.

Much has already been written about Wordle. Educational psychologists have seen it as a way to channel latent information, mathematicians have created algorithms to get the correct word with the least number of attempts and, of course, linguists have gone to town with the possibilities of 5-letter words, dusting out their thesaurus and dictionaries to dig for older, less used words which might crop up.

Many have compared Wordle to scrabble and crossword puzzles, as well as code breaking games. But what they miss is the sheer unhurried aspect of the game. In its sheer simplicity of design and appearance, it creates a calm space, harking back to a simpler time of laid back games of monopoly and ludo, before video games took over.

It’s a world which has been missed, what with the thousands of distractions waiting on different screens, all calling out with sharp, razor’s edge headlines and colour.

Wordle’s popularity is global. There are variations of the game in German, French, Portuguese and many more are coming up. Some are modified to suit the language. In China, programmer Li Zhong’s version shows idioms called chengyu, composed of four characters rather than letters. Urdle, the Urdu version has shorter words and more attempts.

And before you ask, yes, there is an Arabic version of Wordle as well. Alwird was developed by software professionals Abdellatif al Sharif and Amr Keleg and, if its popularity on Twitter is any indication, it is overtaking Wordle in the Arab world. Comments like ‘I forgot this word existed in Arabic’ and ‘Wow, today’s game is tough’ show that there is a large market for word games which, while being trendy and challenging, are also accessible, hosted by individuals and not mega corporates, and have the right mix of technology, social media and old world charm.