What is wordle?
A: Wordle is a web-based word game.
Who created and developed it?
A: Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle.
It is owned and published by whom?
A: The New York Times Company since 2022.
Players have how many attempts to guess a five-letter
word?
A: Six.
Feedback is given for each guess in the form of what?
A: Colored tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct
position.
The mechanics are nearly identical to what?
A: The 1955 pen-and-paper game Jotto and the television game show franchise
Lingo.
Wordle has a single daily solution, with all players
attempting to guess what?
A: The same word.
Wardle initially created the game for whom?
A: Himself and his partner.
When did Wardle make it public?
A: In October 2021.
The game gained a large amount of popularity in
December 2021 after Wardle did what?
A: Added the ability for players to copy their daily results as emoji
squares, which were widely shared on Twitter.
The game was purchased by whom in January 2022?
A: The New York Times Company.
The New York Times plans to keep it what for all
players?
A: Free.
When was it moved to the company's website?
A: In February 2022.
After every guess, each letter is marked as what?
A: Either green, yellow or gray: green indicates that letter is correct and
in the correct position, yellow means it is in the answer but not in the
right position, while gray indicates it is not in the answer at all.
Multiple instances of the same letter in a guess, such
as the "o"s in "robot", will be colored what?
A: Green or yellow only if the letter also appears multiple times in the
answer; otherwise, excess repeating letters will be colored gray.
The game has a "hard mode" option, which requires
players to do what?
A: Include letters marked as green and yellow in subsequent guesses.
The game also has a dark theme as well as a
high-contrast theme for what?
A: Colorblind accessibility, which changes the
color scheme from green and
yellow to orange and blue.
The gameplay is also similar to what two-player board
game?
A: Mastermind.
Each daily game uses a word from what?
A: A randomly ordered list of 2,309 words (out of the approximate 13,000
five-letter words in the English language).
The smaller word list was chosen by Wardle's wife, who
categorized the five-letter words into what?
A: Those she knew, those she did not know, and those she might have known.
Wordle uses American spelling, despite the developer
being from where?
Players outside the US have complained that this
spelling convention does what?
A: Gives American players an unfair advantage, for example in the case of
the solution "favor".
When did Wardle create the prototype of Wordle?
A: In 2013, inspired by the color-matching game Mastermind.
The prototype allowed players to play puzzles
consecutively, and its wordlist was what?
A: Unfiltered.
At first the game used all 13,000 possible five letter
words in the English language, but he found what?
A: That his partner Palak Shah had difficulty recognizing some of the less
common words and made the guessing as haphazard as it was in Mastermind.
After finishing the prototype around 2014, Wardle did
what?
A: He lost interest and set the prototype aside.
In the meantime, Wardle created what?
A: Two online social experiments The Button and Place while working for
Reddit.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, he and his partner
did what?
A: They "got really into" The New York Times' Spelling Bee and daily
crossword puzzle.
Wardle recalled his Wordle prototype and was inspired
by what two elements from Spelling Bee to flesh out the prototype further?
A: The simple-to-use website design for the puzzle, and the limitation of
one puzzle per day.
By January 2021, Wardle had published Wordle on the
web, mostly shared with whom?
A: Himself and his partner.
He had named it Wordle as a what?
A: A pun on his surname.