Why Wordle has become a new online obsession

WORDLE is a quick English-language word game developed by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a unique gift for his partner, released in October 2021. It’s easily accessible online.

The game, in which players guess a five-letter word through linguistic inferences, became an unlikely success, suggesting a change in how we communicate – both in terms of how we socialise, and in our relationship with language.

The popularity of Wordle

Wordle has nearly 3 million players across the world and versions of it are appearing in other languages.

People love talking about it – the number of Wordle tweets increases 26% a day on average – even when they hate playing it (a significant number of Wordle tweets are complaints, usually about the volume or smugness of Wordle tweets).

Because the game allows you to share your result without spoilers, it has inspired fierce competition, with social media being flooded with results, especially high scores.

How to play Wordle

Wordle is often compared to crosswords but the mental process of solving is closer to code-cracking.

Players are able to narrow down possibilities by calculating the probability of different letter combinations. If your first guess produced, say, two letters both yellow, you can make an educated guess about the most likely positions for those letters in English words.

Since the game is based around five letter words, the words almost always involve consonant clusters. These are typically fairly specific to individual languages. In English, “spl” and “spr” are common, for example, but “slr” or “prl” are impossible.

But players also need to be flexible enough not to exclude less likely combinations entirely – and to keep them in mind as you play.

The difficulty of each puzzle depends on the relationship between the solution and the player’s first guess. A lot of this is luck but you can improve your chances statistically by using frequency analysis, a cryptolinguistic technique based on which letters are commonest.

I use “share” as my first guess because it includes the two most common vowels, “s” which is the third most common letter and most common final letter in English words, while “h” and “r” are common individually and even more common in consonant clusters, so their presence or absence instantly knocks out a range of possibilities.

But I admire people who play with less strategy. Lots of people guess on whim.

Once you’ve got past your first guess, players use their knowledge of spelling conventions and sound patterns in English to solve the word – another linguistic technique used in code-breaking. After all, some of the most successful code breakers of the pre-computer age were linguists, precisely because of this skill.