Background

Wordle, now hosted by The New York Times (NYT), is a simple daily word-guessing game that became a global phenomenon after its 2021 creation by Josh Wardle. Players have six tries to guess a five-letter target word; feedback after each guess uses color-coded tiles (green for correct letter and place, yellow for correct letter wrong place, gray for absent letter). The game’s elegant constraints—one puzzle per day, no ads, easy sharing—helped it spread widely before the NYT acquired it in 2022.