Lila Almeida 
By Lila De Almeida
A new word game has dominated over two million people’s days. It’s called Wordle, and its objective is to guess a daily mystery five-letter word in 6 tries or less. You can start with a shot in the dark guess– a common strategy is to start with a word with many vowels, such as ADIEU. Letters that are in the mystery word with the correct placing turn green. Letters that are in the word, but belong in a different place, turn yellow. Letters that are not in the word at any point turn gray. Using these hints, the player has to adjust their guesses to reach the final word. Since there is only one Wordle per day, players are careful not to have it spoiled for them.
However, if you need another word-guessing fix, there are several spinoff websites with different themes. These include Taylordle, a Taylor Swift themed game; Crosswordle, a game where you have to work backwards to find guesses to lead to a given word; Lordle of the Rings, whose theme can be guessed by the name; and Absurdle, which is a version of Wordle in which the software is working against you. There are also two other games structured like Wordle, but instead test your geography skills. These are Globle and Worldle, which both begin with a blind guess, and direct you towards the mystery country with a hot-and-cold system.
The origin of the game is actually a romance. Josh Wardle created Wordle, a play on his last name, for his partner, Palak Shah. Wordle wasn’t for profit; he just created it for Shah because she liked playing word games. However, after Wordle rose to popularity on multiple social media platforms, the New York Times bought the game for over $1,000,000, according to Maite Knorr-Evans. Wordle’s simplicity has landed its creator 7 figures, all because of a thoughtful gift for his partner.
