IAGB Youth Corner

Wordle: the word game gripping the world

What is Wordle? If you’re active on social media, you might see people posting a series of yellow, black, and green box emojis to their story or page. What does this mean and how did Wordle grip onto us becoming a daily task for many people?

Wordle was created by Josh Wardle and was recently sold to The New York Times for a little more than 3 million dollars. Wordle is a free game that can be played on your browser, and the objective of the game is to guess the 5 letter word in less than 6 attempts. When a word is entered, the squares change colors to indicate whether the letter is present in the word. A gray square means the letter is not in the word, a green square means the letter is in the right space and in the word, while yellow means that the letter is in the word, but not in the right space.

To the left, is an example of a Wordle for March 19th. As you can see, it took me a while to figure out the word!

Wordle’s rise to fame is well contributed to Tik Tok and Twitter, since the game spread like wildfire through these platforms. Since then, multiple different versions of Wordle-like games have been released; like Heardle. This game is where a snippet of a popular song is played, and the user has 6 tries to guess the song. 

Wordle has been around since 2013, but due to boredom in the pandemic over the past couple of years, the game’s popularity skyrocketed. Logging onto Twitter, you can see millions of tweets under the hashtag “wordle” showing twitter user’s Wordle guesses for the day. If you haven’t tried Wordle yet, find a time to spend 5 minutes in your day guessing this 5-letter word. Who knows, Wordle can maybe help improve our daily vocabulary!

~ Anshika Shekhar, IAGB Youth Team Member