Wordle Game 2023

Definition of Wordle:

It is a word puzzle game in which the players are given a grid of letters and must create as many words as possible using the letter in the grid. The game is usually played as a time-limited challenge, with the players racing against the clock to see how many words they can create in a specific period of time. Wordle is still one of the biggest puzzle games on the planet.

The game has enjoyed admires in the years past world-wide but 2023 may go down as the year of Wordle. Its become a daily staple for millions around the world. 

Currently the word wordle may look vague to many people but if you are curious to know more about it, ranging from the origin and how it came the lime-light, here’s everything you need to know. 

How is Wordle game played?

Wordle is a daily word game you can find online. It’s fun, simple and, like a crossword, can only be played once a day. Every 24 hours there’s a new word of the day, and it’s up to you to figure out what it is. The site itself does a fantastic job of explaining the rules: 

You guess the wordle in 6 tries. After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word.

Wordle gives players six chances to guess a randomly selected five-letter word. As shown above, if you have the right letter in the right spot, it shows up green. A correct letter in the wrong spot shows up yellow. A letter that isn’t in the word in any spot shows up gray. 

You can enter a total of six words, meaning you can enter five burner words from which you can learn hints about the letters and their placements. Then you get one chance to put those hints to use. Or you can try for performance and guess the word of the day in three, two or even one go.

Wordle is just a word game. But it’s super popular: According to The New York Times, Over 300,000 people were playing it daily by January. The popularity it has garned may sound perplexing, but there are a few tiny details that have resulted in everyone going absolutely bonkers for it.

There’s only one puzzle per day:

This creates a certain level of stakes. You only get one shot at the Wordle. If you mess up, you have to wait until tomorrow to get a brand new puzzle. 

Everyone is playing the exact same puzzle:

 This is crucial, as it makes it easier to ping your buddy and chat about the day’s puzzle. “Today’s was tough!” “How did you get on?” “Did you get it?” Which takes us to the next point…

It’s easy to share your results: 

Once you’ve successfully or unsuccessfully done the puzzle for the day, you’re invited to share your Wordle journey for the day. If you tweet the image, it looks like this…

Note that the word and letters you chose are obscured. All that’s shown is your journey toward the word in a series of yellow, green and gray boxes.

It’s compelling. If you get it easily, maybe in the second or third try, there’s a gloating element whereby you must show your followers how smart you are and share.

If you get it by the skin of your teeth in the sixth go, that’s also a cool story. But most importantly, the puzzle itself isn’t spoiled. 

So Wordle isn’t just a word game, it’s a conversation starter and a chance to show off on social media. That’s why it’s going viral. 

What are the tips, tricks and precautions to take while paying Wordle?

If you’re a word game purist, you may want to avoid the following tips and rely entirely on your own instincts. For everyone else who’s sick of seeing gray boxes, here are some tips that you may find helpful.

Choosing your first word:

 The first word is arguably the most important. To maximize the value of your opening gambit, choose a word with three vowels and five different letters. Some examples: orate, media, radio. I always use “adieu” for some reason. It’s a habit and I’m refusing to break it.

I just finished reading a fascinating piece by Tyler Glaiel, a programmer and game designer who tried to figure out the best possible starting word. Apparently we should all be kicking off Wordle with the word “roate.” Honestly, read this whole article, it’s great.

Avoid reusing grays: 

There’s a keyboard at the bottom of the Wordle board that shows what letters are green, yellow and gray. Avoid reusing letters that have come up gray. Yes, this sounds obvious. But it can take time and effort to think of five-letter words that don’t use letters you’ve already tried. That effort will pay off.

Letters can appear twice:

 This complicates matters, especially when you’re running out of letters to try on word four or five. But letters often recur, as with words like chill, sissy and ferry having been the correct answers in the past. 

Who invented Wordle?

Josh Wardle, a software engineer who originally created Wordle for his partner, a fan of word games. Extremely online people may remember Wardle as the creator of Place, an utterly wild collaborative art project/social experiment that sent the internet into a wild excitment in April 2017.

Wordle got a mention in The New York Times in November of 2021, but really got traction when the share element got added.

In a Reddit post, Wardle said he wanted Wordle to feel like a croissant, a “delightful snack” that’s enjoyed occasionally. This is explicitly why there’s only one puzzle per day. “Enjoyed too often,” he explained, “and they lose their charm,” Wardle says.  

Acquisition of Wordle by New York Times

At the end of January, creator Josh Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times 

Wardle noted that his “game has gotten bigger than I ever imagined” and added he’s “just one person.”

The game will ultimately become part of New York Times subscription puzzle service, but Wardle made sure that Wordle would remain free-to-play and that current streaks would be preserved in the move.

“It is important to me that, as Wordle grows, it continues to provide a great experience to everyone,” Wardle said. “Given this, I am incredibly pleased to announce that I’ve reached an agreement with The New York Times for them to take over running Wordle going forward.”

Is there any change since New York Times acquired Wordle?

According to The New York Times: “Nothing has changed about the game play,” but the New York Times’ communications director, Jordan Cohen said things have changed a little since then.

Now the New York Times has assigned a full time Editor to run Wordle. This means the daily puzzle is drawing from a more curated list of words. 

“The game will have a Times-curated word list and will be programmed and tested like the Spelling Bee and the Crossword,” said the New York Times in a statement. 

Hilariously, the statement even made reference to that earlier, “more challenging” rumor.

“After nearly a year of speculation, it will finally be our fault if Wordle is harder,” read the statement.

Wordle clones…

Since the success of Wordle, there’s been clones. Lots of clones. Some have been cynical cash grabs, but a huge amount of them are unique, interesting alternatives. 

• Worldle invites you to guess countries based on their outline.
• Squabble is a multiplayer, Battle Royale version of Wordle.
• Dordle forces you to solve two Wordles at once.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a fairly comprehensive list of word games you can check out if you get tired of the original.

These were the 10 Most Difficult Wordle Words of 2022

When Wordle was at the peak of its popularity at the beginning of this year, folks would go ballistic if that day’s Wordle was weird or difficult. But what was the toughest Wordle of 2022?

This’s precisely what gaming site I’m a Puzzle attempted to figure out, trawling through data stored in a Twitter API called WordleStats. How does it work? Well, remember when absolutely everyone was posting their Wordle attempts on Twitter? WordleStats has been collecting that data, and calculating difficulty based on the relative success and failure of each puzzle. 

So what were the hardest words? According to the numbers they are…

1. PARER
2. FOYER
3. CATCH
4. WATCH
5. MUMMY
6. CATER
7. COYLY
8. TRITE
9. FOUND
10. TACIT

Some of this checks out;  A number of them — like FOYER or TACIT — feel like words I’d spell incorrectly. Others like PARER barely feel like words that actually exist. All of them, outside maybe CATER or FOUND, feel like words that might be difficult to solve using traditional Wordle techniques like loading up on vowels early, for example.

But we absolutely have to take this study with the proverbial grain of salt, especially given that it was based on people posting on Twitter. It’s possible more people failed on less obvious words that we didn’t post on Twitter or that people were more likely to post successes if the word was deemed difficult.

It’ll be interesting to see how Wordle plays out in the future. Months after buying the game from creator Josh Wardle, The New York Times has finally assigned a full-time editor to manage the Wordle process, which means new words will be manually chosen, as opposed to being selected at random. 

For more Wordle tips and tricks, here’s a roundup of excellent strategies. Plus, New York Times Games has released a new way to play Wordle. If you’re done with Wordle for the day, try these other addictive puzzle games.

These 3 Wordle Starter Words Almost Guarantee a Winning Streak

These are our favorites.

I think about Wordle a little too much. My two-step strategy of starting with TRAIN and then trying CLOSE as my second word got me to a near-100 winning streak before I blew it a month back. I guessed VAULT instead of FAULT.

So I went back to the Wordle drawing board, deciding I needed to try a three-starter-word strategy. Usually guessing TRAIN and CLOSE as my first two words gives me a decent number of accurate letters that I just need to shuffle into the right spots. But sometimes it doesn’t. Then I’m staring blankly at a grid, with four guesses remaining and zero idea what to do.

TRAIN and CLOSE, my starter words, use all 10 of the 10 most commonly used letters in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, according to Reader’s Digest. That’s pretty good, I thought. But where do I go from there, if that gets me nothing? For a while, I tried WHELM, thinking that W, H, L and M were all good consonants to get out of the way. It worked OK, but not great. I was under-WHELMED.

Pumped about ‘UMPED’

But for the past month, I’ve been using this strategy:

1. First word…TRAIN
2. Second word…CLOSE (sometimes CLOSE gets me nothing, but those are big letters I can’t skip)
3. Third word…UMPED. Yes, “UMPED” is a word. I hate reusing the E, but UMPED gets me the last of the five main vowels, three big consonants, and does try the E in a spot where it often appears.

‘X’ marks the spot

Once I’ve guessed those three words, I almost always have a decent amount of letters to play with. Now it’s usually just rearranging the letters to find the Wordle answer.

At this point, I guess I could just write down possible words, but I like to type possibilities into the Wordle grid using an “X” where I don’t know the letter.  Maybe I know the word ends in “ER” and somewhere in there is an D. So I might type in DXXER and then try and figure it out from there. (“DIVER?”) 

More on Wordle

I backspace a lot and try different words, making sure not to hit the ENTER key by accident. But typing enough words with Xes usually stirs something in my brain. (Remember, the X is just standing in for a blank, so use any letter there you want.)

A last resort … or a cheat?

If you’re just stuck beyond belief and don’t want to lose your streak, I’ve got a suggestion. But honestly, I kind of consider it cheating. 

Sites such as Crossword Solver allow you to select any word length (five letters for Wordle) and then enter in any letters you have. Then, the site provides words that fit those requirements.

This only really helps if you know what position at least two letters are in, though you can fool around with it if you have letters, and don’t know their location.

New Wordle rules

The New York Times bought Wordle from creator Josh Wardle back in January, and has now put one of its editors in charge of the word list. So if you think the words have gotten harder, you’re probably right. (“INANE,” the answer for Nov. 13, felt especially like a New York Times answer to me.)

Also, the Times explained once again how plurals work in the game. The game won’t use simple plurals, like “FOXES” or “SPOTS,” words that just add an S or ES to a singular word. But they might use plurals like GEESE. That’s all well and good, but sometimes I’ll guess a simple plural, like LIONS, knowing it’s not the answer, but trying to establish some letter locations. That’s the fun of Wordle, play it however you want to get the answer. Guess as guess can.

I’m going to keep on plugging away at Wordle on a daily basis. It gives me a nice little brain jolt and it’s sure satisfying to see all those green letters flip over when you guess correctly.

And while I don’t always use my three-word method, it’s satisfying to have it in my back pocket for when I’m really stumped. Hope it helps you, too.