All of us are still trying to find ways to stay in touch with one another as the pandemic progresses, and social games are one of those ways. Wordle, a daily puzzle game, has become a social game like “Words with Friends” and “Candy Crush” in the past, and is sweeping the Internet with its unique twist on classic word-guessing games. There is a good chance that you’ve heard your coworkers talking about the word of the day, or your mother-in-law is playing it, or your boss is playing it during meetings, and you’re wondering if you should join the bandwagon yourself. (there are even Wordle Solver sites to help you if you get stuck – but don’t be a Wordle Cheat!)
What makes it so popular and easy to play is that it’s simple to learn and find. Every day, players must guess a five-letter word that will fit in a blank grid on the website, and they have only six tries to do so. Each day’s Wordle solution is the same for everyone, and players are free to share the gray, yellow, and green square pattern (without the actual letters) on social media to show how they did on the Wordle solution for that day. If you want to learn how to play Wordle, keep reading to learn how to play this fun word game with your family and friends.
Where Can Wordle be Found?
There isn’t an official downloadable app for Android or Apple yet because the game is web-based, but there have been some copycats who have tried to recreate it in their own applications and Wordle clones. A desktop or mobile browser, and the address https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/, are all you really need. Be aware, there is already a game called “Wordle” in the Google Play store, but it is a different game. As it is web based, it is technically a mobile game when used on a mobile phone’s browser, but can be played from a computer as well. The timer for each day’s new word resets at midnight, so you only have until then to make your guess. It’s common for people to open a browser tab in the morning and spend most of the day trying to guess the word.
How it All Works
The goal of the game is to guess a five letter word by placing the correct letter in six rows of five blank boxes, which represent your guesses for the day when the game is loaded up. The correct daily word will appear at the top of the page once you have filled in a word guess in each row with a subsequent guess. If you’re successful in figuring out the pattern, you’ll be able to send hints to your friends via social media, where your colored square grid will appear without the letters.
As you begin to enter your guesses in a daily Wordle puzzle, keep in mind that your answer must be an actual English word. A valid five-letter word must fit into the squares in a row in order to be accepted as a guess in a given game.
When a guess includes an incorrect letter, it will turn the square gray. A yellow letter square means that a letter is in the word, but it’s in the wrong spot. A green letter square indicates that the letter is correct, and that it is in the correct position. A strategy can then be devised after this is grasped. When it comes to choosing a first word, most people choose a word that has a lot of vowels in it, but this allows you to narrow down your word options. Hit the “Enter” key to submit your answer.
At the bottom of the screen is a facsimile of a standard keyboard, which will, like in the game Hangman, begins eliminating previously used letters, showing whether they were correct or incorrect by their color as in the grid squares, to allow you to narrow down even further your word choices by using letters you have not previously used. The keyboard will show you the letters you have incorrectly guessed in dark gray or black, the letters you haven’t guessed yet in light gray, and when all of the letters turn green indicating you have guessed the right word, you will know you have won the game for the day.
What Are the Game’s Unique Features?
You can only play once per day, but for many people, this is enough, as they have spent all day trying to guess the correct word. There is also a high-contrast “color blind” version available and a dark mode as well, which can be toggled using the gear symbol in the upper right corner next to the name of the game. You can also activate “hard mode” from the gear symbol. For those who have low vision or difficulty seeing, developer Cariad Eccleston, the developer of antagonist.app, created a way to see your results in text form by pasting the results copied from the world site to this translator at wa11y.co/ to render a text description of what you did.
Who Created It?
Josh Wardle, a software engineer, created the game as a present for his crossword-puzzle-obsessed partner. It all started in 2020 when the two of them began participating in the New York Times daily crossword puzzles and the NYT Spelling Bee. Wardle wanted his game to be accessible, simple to play, and engrossing for players. As soon as a New York Times article detailing the game’s development and gameplay appeared, it went viral, and players haven’t looked back since.
Popular Wordle Strategies
There are many different ways to narrow down the word of the day’s possibilities, just like in any previous word game. The way people play Wordle is already being studied by psychologists, who are trying to figure out how to use this word game strategy to examine personality. In order to quickly eliminate words from the bottom keyboard, most people begin in easy mode and work their way up to hard mode, starting with words that have several vowels.
“Adieu” is a popular first word choice for the game because it contains four vowels early on, which helps narrow down the word options. It is also claimed by some that the word “aisle,” which does not use as many vowels as the previous word, but instead uses the English vowels most commonly used, is more appropriate at this point in time. Another common starter word is “audio,” which uses all but the “E” of the vowel alphabet.
Others prefer to not focus on vowels at all, but instead make use of five-letter words that use the most commonly used letters in the English language overall. Using a combination of the words “teary” and “pious” as your first two word choices allows you to cover all of the vowels and the letters T, or, P, and S, which are also highly used in other words. For some, it’s fun to see if they can get any of the letters by using words like “yacht” or “ulcer,” rather than relying on a letter reveal.
The words “cheat,” “manic,” and “first” are frequently used by players who also love the New York Times Spelling Bee game, as these words are commonly used in that game as well to create various letter combinations, which is why many fans use them. Others, on the other hand, use no strategies at all, instead going with the first word that pops into their head or the one that feels right.
Sharing on Social Media
Wordle wasn’t initially created with the idea of sharing with friends online, but when Wordle users started using green, black, and yellow square emojis to share their results on Twitter, the developers quickly added a “share” button so that users could copy the results after they finished the game without giving away the daily word to anyone who hasn’t played or guessed it yet. Sharing the results reveals not only how quickly someone arrived at a solution, but also the mistakes they made along the way.
If you want to share results on a PC browser, look for an icon that looks like a bar graph (the leaderboard) at the top right of the Wordle game page near the gear symbol. Your results will be copied to your clipboard in emoji format when you click on this and select the green “share” button. In a separate browser window, open a new post on your Facebook or Twitter profile and paste the copied results from the Wordle website into it.
In order to play the game on your phone, it is assumed that you will be using your phone’s browser. After tapping on the leaderboard icon in the upper right corner, click “share,” open your social media app, open a new post, and then click “share,” and you’re all set! If you go to the leaderboard icon on your smartphone and tap the green “share” button, you can copy your results to the clipboard of your device using the “copy text” selection, and then paste them into any other app. Next, open the app in question, type a new post’s subject line into the text box, then paste the results.
So there you have it, a simple explanation of the newest viral word game phenomenon. So what are you waiting for? Get online and start playing Wordle. In no time at all, you’ll be chatting with your coworkers at the water cooler and posting your results on social media, especially when you correctly guess the daily word on the first try.