

The probability is high, however, that no X appears in the solution word. In fact, only 37 of the possible words contain an X. Maybe it’s better to start with a word such as “Texas.” If a rare letter such as X is contained in the solution word, you would clear out a huge amount of the 2,309 possible solutions in the first step. But is that really the best choice? Information Content versus Hit Rate Of course, you could be lucky, and the solution word could also contain two Ts-but in all other cases, you won’t gain any information. According to the New York Times, the most popular starting words are “adieu” or “audio.” Because both words consist of many vowels, they quickly make clear what letters are in the solution word. You’ve wasted one of five places where you could have gathered information about other letters. For instance, “start” is not a very smart first attempt because it contains the letter T twice. If you’ve ever tried your hand at Wordle, then you know the result depends heavily on the starting word you choose. Anything less than that is considered a success. Most people need about four tries on average to solve a Wordle.

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A special feature of the game is that after playing, you can download the color code from your game (that is, the colored playing fields) as an emoji and share it on social media to compare yourself with others. By March 2022 tens of millions of people around the world had already played Wordle at least once.

In January 2022 the New York Times announced it had acquired the rights to Wordle for a low seven-figure sum. Another week later the game had two million users. Ninety users were playing Wordle every day on Novemby January 1, 2022, the number had already reached 300,000. Shortly thereafter Wordle went through the roof.
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At some point, their family members caught wind of the game, and Wardle decided in October 2021 to offer it on his personal website, free of charge and without advertising. For several months they were the only two users. He picked up his Wordle idea again in early 2021 to make an easy-to-use game to pass the time with his partner. An Unexpected Successīut a global crowd-pleaser wasn’t what Wardle was aiming for at all. This twist gives the game a social component that has probably contributed to its popularity. Every day there is only one solution word-and it’s the same word for all players around the world. Adding to the thrill, you can’t play the game multiple times in a row. The goal is to find the solution word in as few tries as possible. Because that list also contains highly unusual expressions such as “aahed” (the past tense of “aah”), however, the solution word is part of a much shorter list of 2,309 common English terms. You can enter any English word consisting of five letters, of which there are about 10,000. The principle is somewhat reminiscent of Mastermind, a game that was popular in the 1970s. Following these clues, you can type a second word and gather information about the letters of the solution word until you discover the answer you are looking for. They become green if the letter appears in the exact place in the solution word, yellow if the letter is included in a different place in the solution and gray if the letter is not part of the solution. You first type a word-for example, “start”-by inputting letters into five free fields. You have six attempts to correctly determine a five-letter word. Wardle came up with the basic idea back in 2013. Even though the game revolves around guessing a word that changes daily, there is a lot of mathematics behind it. Twitter timelines flooded with Wordle results. The word game he then created, called Wordle, based on his last name, became a smash hit in 2022. At one point, Wardle remembered an idea for a similar game he had thought up a few years earlier.
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How did you spend the past few years as the COVID pandemic raged and limited our leisure options? Software developer Josh Wardle and his partner passed the time with crossword puzzles from the New York Times.
