Defend The Indefensible: Wordle

This garbage psy-op robot nonsense has taken over a significant percentage of my social media feeds. What's worse, its adherents seem to be extremely defensive about any and all criticism of their willful perversion of the signal-to-noise ratio. A pox on all of thee.

https://josiegirlblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Screen-Shot-2022-02-06-at-2.07.26-PM-1024x1010.jpg

Octordle is better

oh yes, I forgot to rant about the tiresome and inevitable copycat spinoffs that will continue for the rest of time

I think its neat that it's a one-a-day thing and everyone gets the same word. the communal aspect of that is cool & I like that it only asks for a couple minutes of your day. watching Twitter bitch about a word like TACIT is kinda fun

Tbh, I don't see it in my Twitter feed as much as I did a month ago, though I'm still playing and enjoying it. I usually do it when I'm making coffee in the morning, and I agree that it's nice to have a little 5-minute diversion once a day.

like I'm actually kind of charmed that there's a popular game that does NOT encourage people to play it as much as possible. makes me feel like someone actually respects my time

Agree with these last few, although these days I kind of enjoy the quordle challenge more. Someone I know described wordle itself as an amuse-bouche which I thought was fair and apt.

I stopped posting my 🖼 on social media a while back, probably only did it a few times anyway.

love wordle and only see it on socials a little any more.

Yeah, I've only ever shared a result a few times, but wgaf if people want to do it every day. It's better than seeing corny self affirmation graphics and other people's horoscope memes.

I play and enjoy, wouldn’t really think to post results on socials but I have a few Wordle pals with whom it is fun to compare experiences - feel a small dose of wholesome fun is allowed IMO

Was surprised when it was sold to the NYT for a “low six figure sum”, felt it was probably worth quite a bit more

I play and enjoy, wouldn’t really think to post results on socials but I have a few Wordle pals with whom it is fun to compare experiences - feel a small dose of wholesome fun is allowed IMO

Was surprised when it was sold to the NYT for a “low six figure sum”, felt it was probably worth quite a bit more

It’s an easy & fun puzzle to do over a cup of tea

The once-a-day release and the social aspect (plus the visual aspect of the squares &c) is the inspired part for sure, it’s been said enough times but during the pandemic these low-stakes communal experiences are particularly appreciated. Same goes for that spelling bee thing that I don’t play because not free (also I played a trial version and it said LING is not a word which anyone who’s ever done a crossword might have something to say about)

OP needs to get some perspective

what's psy op abt it?

i think its ok. what wins said about spelling bee, the creator of that needs a heavy punishment beating. most days

i will never take time from my busy important life to play a daily word game but i greatly like the way wordle's soothing untranslateable abstract pattern pops up to interrupt the relentless harshness of my war-torn TL its like visual ASMR from donald judd

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck, and few don't eventually guess the word, I quickly stopped playing. But I concede there's probably something soothing to that for some folks. Not everything has to be doing the Times crossword in pen with the timer going.

lest we forget (images lost to time):
mastermind, the game

^pvmic

played Mastermind a lot as a kid

anyway was coming here to agree with you all that Wordle hate is futile (and passe) in March 2022 but I did just see #WordleTheAlbum trending on UK Twitter so

Yes, let's reserve our hate for the Wordle Movie (coming spring 2024)

Sounds like a Pokemon character already.

I love Quordle and play it every day. So does my bf and my mom. Idk why anybody wouldn’t enjoy it except that they find people sharing their results tiresome, but it was fun the other day to scratch my head at JUNTO and Google “junto” and get back all these people on Twitter screaming “wtf is a JUNTO?!”

^seconded

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it. I suspect it will be a very long time before we see a word repeated, but ones in common usage will be fewer and farther between until then.

I do find the copycats thing annoying as they spring up so quickly it feels cynical and like skilled people not busy enough in their job are just hanging around waiting for someone else to prove something is worth their precious time and effort. Ah wait this has kinda been my life MO minus the actual success and now I am too busy.

This garbage psy-op robot nonsense

look dude I understand not wanting to have any part of the latest trend but you clearly don't even understand what Wordle is

to be clear i'm not a Wordle "adherent" and i don't post about Wordle on social media - but it's really actually harmless

@ johnny fever are you suggesting that ..... we are running out of words after 200 games?

.....

Nope, I'm just guessing that Wardle, when developing the game, probably used a lot of commonly used words first before poring over his dictionary for stretching out the game's lifespan. NYT is still following the original game's numbering and wordlist afaik, so the words are only going to get more obscure before it circles around and gets easy again.

so its creator is called Wardle ffs

I feel this fact will have been discussed to death on corners of the web I've thankfully not encountered yet

some words that have already appeared as answers: rebut, humph, whelp, wooer, agora (last one removed by nyt). i'm guessing he randomised the list (of 2315 words, enough for over 6 years of gameplay), which was already had very obscure words filtered out by his girlfriend.

wooer some bullshit

Semantle is better

I like it because it's only once a day--it's impossible to develop the kind of addiction I have to internet Scrabble and internet backgammon. Half the time I forget to even check for that day's Wordle. I've done about 40--only got it in two once. I don't think I'd ever post on Facebook about it...though I do post Scrabble screenshots here and on Facebook.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

(xps & ledge has already got there first but)

I agree that this could happen (though have not paused to guess how many five letter words might be reasonably familiar to most people) but the 3rd and 4th Wordle answers were "sissy" and "humph"!

Can only imagine the reaction to those on Twitter now, "sissy" with a triple letter and a word I would not care to use in conversation unless very obviously joking, and "humph" right on the onomatopoeic word-or-not faultline (although I think it came up in Dordle or Quordle or Octordle recently).

(Yes I have been playing all 4 of these games lately; Wordle is a nice quick thing to do when you have a spare minute, and Quordle hits the a better sweet spot for actual puzzliness for me. Octordle is just too much, although possibly only because the UI is horrible and you can only see two of the words at once.)

Once I realized there was no skill involved, and heaps of luck

Half agree with this. One weird thing is that getting it in two (where's there's at least some reasoning involved) is more impressive than getting it in one (100% blind luck). I feel like I've used a lot of reasoning in the ones I've gotten in three and four.

I mean there’s the same amount of luck involved as other letter guessing games like wheel of fortune & hangman

xp yes, picking a second or third guess to eliminate as many alternatives as possible is definitely something you can do to improve on blind luck.

here's a few out of many non obscure words in the last 50 or so (apologies if anyone remembers this six years from now and complains about spoilers): hello, adult, rival, piece.

I'd say getting it in 2 is mostly just luck, though you can boost your chances a bit, and there can be a large amount of luck even with the 3s; if you're unlucky and/or don't pause to think through all the options you can lose, but most players will get there in less than 6 most days. So from the game design point of view Wordle is not perfect, but it's a fun enough pastime for a tea break, anyway.

And I admit when I see the green and yellow squares popping up I mostly think "nobody cares how many you got it in" (but yes, I've still talked about the day's puzzles online, so guilty too) but it's kind of nice to see the internet talking about something so harmless imo.

Working from home, I get to watch a TV quiz show called "Lingo".

This, basically, is the same as Wordle. Or so it seems.

I have not signed onto "Wordle" or anything similar, as the TV show is enough already.

(xp to self) Or, a month ago there were a lot of squares on my timeline and I'd think "nobody cares" but now there aren't so many, so when they do pop up it can be vaguely interesting to see if I can work backwards a bit to guess what word the poster started with.

(If I know them well enough to care at all what random words they typed into a webpage, which tbh is probably a stupid thing to think about at all.)

I just tried Semantle! God it is hard. I guessed the second-closest word on my 25th guess then spent my next twenty guesses on variations of that word instead of... something immediately adjacent to that word

Wordle is fine. I'm less interested in it now that it's on the Times website, and presumably will be paywalled soon. I still do them some days. It was fun when it was just a random web thing, sort of felt like a 90s internet throwback. I knew it wouldn't last that way.

I think its neat that it's a one-a-day thing and everyone gets the same word. the communal aspect of that is cool & I like that it only asks for a couple minutes of your day. watching Twitter bitch about a word like TACIT is kinda fun

Yeah, this. I don't post my own results on social media, but my wife and text them to each other every morning, and I'll occasionally chime in on someone else's Wordle post. I think it's a charming little game, with a charming little backstory, and it's charming that the dude got a million bucks from the NYT for something he made just for fun. Hard for me to see the harm.

my wife and I, that should say.

man alive otm

the original site's code was 100% client-side so you could just save the webpage to your computer and it would work offline for another 6 years until it runs out of words. i.e. it was made in a way thats impossible to paywall. the times basically just bought the name & idea.

My favorite thing was the pissy person on Twitter who scraped the word list from the code and made a bot that would post spoilers for tomorrow's word on everyone's results, I have never been irritated by something so much that it made me go out of my way to be an ass to people I don't know

Totally organic, I swear

Nice. Apparently they started repeating words this month so <googles the length of their list> maybe p = 1/2,315 ?

Wordle 1,710 (MONDAY)

⬜⬜⬜🟩🟨
⬜⬜🟨🟩🟨
🟩⬜🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

i don't think they've actually repeated any words yet, but they have said it's now a possibility. I'm excited to see what the first repeated word will be.... x-D

Since we're doing nice patterns...

⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Waste, Tramp, Float, Attic

Wordle 1,710 3/6*

🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟨🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

toney > stair

XP: My understanding was that CIGAR, at the start of the month, marked the transition to something a biiiiit closer to quasi-random selection from the whole pool. (But yeah, that was a jokey special case, as CIGAR had been the answer for puzzle #1.)

Aaaah, SQUAD and, um, today's word have also been repeats, it seems!

They could also move on and do 6 letters? Or is that heresy and only 5L words are special and magical. The pool would be slightly bigger (like, 50%) but I don't suppose that necessarily means you need more steps. If the creators have a pool of 2315 and we are nearing 2000, even repeating letters has limited longevity.

repeating words*

xps oh really? good to know!

Wordle 1,710 4/6

⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - bloat - staff

snowed in here and school was closed for my kids so we did this together and everyone was stumped for a solid 5 minutes after guess 3.

I misspoke above: AWAKE was the third recycled word. Not sure why that still felt like "today's word" a couple days on.

Wordle 1711 (TUESDAY)

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟨⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

For some reason I started with a 5-letter word I happened to have just read. Can't claim it was a particularly good move!

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Coral, Trend, River, Buyer

Wordle 1,711 6/6

⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 hahahaha fuuuuuuuck youuuuuu wordle

lol!

Wordle 1,711 4/6

🟩🟨🟨⬜⬜
🟩⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩⬜⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 1,711 6/6

🟨⬜⬜🟩⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟩⬜
⬜🟩🟨🟩⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

right there with you, WmC!

Three greens was the absolute worst thing I could have gotten on the first word.

Lucky with 2nd guess

Wordle 1,711 3/6*

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟨⬛🟨⬛🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

SPICE - EARLY

Wordle 1712 (WEDNESDAY)

🟩🟨🟩⬜⬜
🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Bot sez there were 4 remaining possibilities after word 2. Somehow managed *not* to exhaust the whole list today.

Wordle 1,712 5/6

🟨⬛⬛🟩⬛
🟩⬛⬛🟩🟨
🟩⬛🟩🟩⬛
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - spier - sorel - sured

Wordle 1,712 5/6

🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜
🟨🟨⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Yeesh! What are the odds of getting 4 letters in the wrong place twice?

Wordle 1,712 4/6*

🟩⬛⬛⬛🟨
🟩⬛🟨⬛🟩
🟩⬛🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

STALE - SPEND - SIRED

Another pretty lucky random starter

Wordle 1,712 3/6

🟧🟧⬛⬛🟦
🟧🟧⬛🟧🟦
🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧

shave - sheer

Wordle 1713 (THURSDAY)

⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

There were no other possibilities after #3, surprisingly. (For some reason I can more easily force my way through to the bot lately lol.)

It was alright

⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 1,713 3/6

⬜🟩⬜🟨🟨
🟨🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - caned

Wordle 1714 (FRIDAY)

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Hmmmmm

Wordle 1,714 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

bonked out after missing this 4 times -> 🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩

was close to setting a new high streak at 66 but missed "BUYER" a few days ago so it doesn't sting as bad

"BUYER" also ended my streak

Wordle 1,714 5/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - sloth - picky - jiffy

Wordle 1715 (SATURDAY)

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Really, REALLY struggled to think of this sole remaining possibility. A truly ridiculous span of minutes given what I had to work with.

Wordle 1,715 3/6*

⬛⬛⬛🟨🟨
🟨🟨⬛⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

stead > drama

Wordle 1,715 4/6

🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - crawl - afros

the time between guesses 3 & 4 felt like ages

Wordle 1,715 2/6*

⬜⬜🟩🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Lucky starting word: cedar. Nearly went for the more obvious radio on second go but knew we'd had it before so thought it'd be more fun to go for something new, despite the new repeat policy

^ Noice.

Wordle 1716 (SUNDAY)

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I can barely remember completing this one, <6 hours on!!

Wordle 1717 (MONDAY)

🟩🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟨⬜⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Went fast

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟩
🟩⬜⬜⬜🟩
🟩⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 1,717 4/6

⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟨🟨🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟨🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

ramen - melts - smell

Wordle 1,717 3/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 1,717 2/6

🟩🟨⬜🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

"BUYER" also ended my streak

― Vinnie, Friday, February 27, 2026 12:03 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

also wanna mention my last guess on that was "QUEER", thought for sure that had to be it, guess woke really is dead

Wordle 1718 (TUES)

🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨
⬜🟩🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Wordle 1,718 5/6

⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
⬛⬛⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩⬛🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

went "we are the champions" on the 2nd guess

ramen - queen - liven - liken

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟨⬜🟨🟩
🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Crown, Plain, Liken, Linen

Wordle 1719 (WEDNESDAY)

⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Sometimes you just can't see it

🟩⬜⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Trace, Tempo, Tiled, Thewy, Thens, Theft

Same second word. *high five*

Wordle 1,719 5/6*

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟨🟨🟨⬛
🟩⬛🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

music >broad > jetty > tweet

scary first two there, tbh.