Mum’s the Wordle for code breakers who discovered game’s secret

THERE are many approaches to solving a Wordle game. Some players of the wildly popular word-guessing game start with whichever five-letter word first comes into their head. Others make tactical use of words containing common letters.

A small number of Wordle fans, however, have found another route to the answers – but are respecting the game’s “code of silence” by keeping the solutions private. Two computing experts who met at the University of Cambridge are among those to have discovered that the code underpinning the Wordle webpage contains each day’s solution, from “cigar” on June 19 2021, to… well, that would be telling.

Dr Ramsey Faragher, a bye-fellow at Queen’s College and the founder of a tech company, tipped off his friend and former student Dr Sam Gregson, a former Large Hadron Collider physicist who is now a comedian and science commentator. As Dr Faragher predicted, Dr Gregson found the list of answers within the webpage’s source code. “It certainly seems to be the case that there is an informal code of silence and a great deal of community spirit in the Wordle community,” Dr Gregson said. “Few seem to want to share or broadcast the readily available answers and those that do are met with gentle hostility or eye-rolling silence.”

Dr Gregson, 38, is using the information he and Dr Faragher, 39, have unearthed to craft an analysis of optimal Wordle strategy for his video channel, The Bad Boy of Science. Bad boy though he may be, Dr Gregson does not wish to crimp others’ enjoyment of the game. As such, he is cagey about publicly revealing the list of answers.

Appropriately for a game whose integrity is so highly valued, Wordle has innocent origins. Designed by Welshborn software engineer Josh Wardle to entertain his puzzle-loving partner, Wordle was a simple online game whose players – the two of them – sought to guess a five-letter word in six attempts. Then it went viral.

Having had 90 players on Nov 1 last year, Wordle reached 2.7 million last week. Along the way, many of its players began to use mathematics to devise the most effective opening plays possible, with little-known words such as “roate” catapulted back into the English lexicon.

The informal omerta has not been universally observed.

Jill Sutcliffe, a moderator on a Facebook group of Wordle aficionados, says that upcoming answers have been posted on two occasions. Mrs Sutcliffe, a retired court worker who lives in Fife, swiftly deleted the offending posts, saving the group’s 9,000 members from having their daily Wordle session ruined. “It was awful,” she said, “because once you see the answers you can’t unsee them. But mostly people are respectful.”

The Daily Telegraph has verified the list but will not spoil the game by revealing the answers. Should you doubt Drs Gregson and Faragher, though, check Sunday’s answer against a five-letter word, beginning with C, used in this article.