What Is Wordle & Who Created It?

Wordle at three.

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What Is Wordle & Who Created It
Image: Unsplash

Created by software engineer ‘Josh Wardle’ from Brooklyn, New York, Wordle is a straightforward and free-word guessing game. However, Worldle is no piece of cake, which is probably one of the reasons why it has everybody addicted to it. Moreover, the Twitterati can’t stop tweeting how simple yet demanding the game is.

Before we move on with the game, let’s dive in to see how Wordle came to be. Josh Wardle, the creator, created the game for his partner, Palak Shah. Knowing she loved word games, Wardle created a word-guessing game for the two of them to play. And since you can probably make it out by now, he named it by his last name, ‘Wordle.’

While Wordle was restricted to the couple upon its inception, Wardle shared the game with his family members after months of it coming into existence. Seeing his family members quickly becoming obsessed over the game, he introduced Wardle to the rest of the world in October. Two whole months later, more than 300,000 people have played the game.

What is Wordle?

Wordle puzzle
Image: Wordle

The game is simple, yet it isn’t. While the game is a no-brainer, solving the puzzle will make you feel like Stephen Hawking. Wordle is a browser game and is the same puzzle for everyone each day. The puzzle being the same for everyone means you can directly compare the progress with others.

As you may have thought, no puzzle game comes without a basic set of rules, and Wordle has rules, too; here they are.

  1. Guess the world, any five-letter word, in six tries.
  2. After each guess, Wordle will give players hints about the correctness of their guesses. Whether the letters are in the word or not, if they’re in the right spot.
  3. That’s it. Using these hints, complete the puzzle for the day, or don’t.

For the mega minds who find the default difficulty too easy for them, there’s a hard mode too. The hard mode can be activated by clicking on the settings wheel in the top-right corner of the screen when you’re in the game.

Wordle rules
Image: Wordle

Who is Josh Wardle?

According to the LinkedIn profile of the creator of Wordle, Josh Wardle is an artist, product manager, and software engineer at Reddit. Furthermore, he earned an MFA degree at the University of Oregon and a BA degree in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In addition, Josh Wardle is most famous as the creator of two online experiments, The Button (2015) and The Place (2017). The Button was a Reddit game with a 60-second countdown. Each time a user pressed the Button, the time would reset until the timer reached zero.

The Place, on the other hand, was a canvas game that had players fighting over what was to be drawn on the canvas; the Place lasted for a good 72 hours. Along with a career with Reddit, Josh Wardle has also worked as a software engineer for Pinterest.

While many see Wordle as just another puzzle game, it’s not. Wordle is much more than that; it’s a love story created for a partner who loves cryptic crosswords and watching spelling bee contests.

If you like this simple explainer, check out our Short Bytes section. We take complex tech topics and break them into short, easy-to-understand articles.

Akshay Bhardwaj

Akshay Bhardwaj

A casual gamer, fascinated with everything geeky, mostly found lazing around. I drink, and I don't know things!
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