A Love Letter (Or Five) To ‘Wordle’
When I wake up, the first thing I do is reach for my phone- and I’m not ashamed of it. Blinking through bleary eyes as the glare of my screen pierces the darkness of my room every morning, I unlock my phone before even considering reading a book or going back to sleep. I head to the Safari app and search for my new favourite website; Wordle. The word game that’s captured the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people.
The familiar six rows of five blank boxes greet me before I’ve seen any of my uni housemates that day. I type in my first five-letter word, aiming for something with common vowels and consonants like “teams” or “moats”, praying for a green box or two so I can start the day with a rush of endorphins.
For my Wordle newbies, the aim of the game is to correctly guess the five-letter word of the day in six guesses or less. If a letter you have entered turns green then you have the correct letter in the correct position in the word, if it turns orange you have the correct letter in the wrong position, and if it turns black you have the wrong letter. The idea is that you then shuffle your orange letters around in the hopes it turns green and eventually hit the jackpot and have five green boxes in a row, having successfully worked out the word of the day. A Wordler’s (can I call us Wordlers?) life-goal is to one day wake up and enter the word of the day as our first guess. I’d probably faint.
Writer and TV host Richard Osman shares his Wordle results every day to his million+ followers, and he is far from the only one.
Scrolling through my Twitter timeline reveals so many black, orange, and green squares that they become a blur if I scroll too quickly. ‘Wordle’ has trended at least twice this week, whether it’s people sharing their results of the day or uniting in their frustration at being unable to think of relevant five-letter words, even though English is full of them. “Wordle humiliation”, as I’ve started to call it, is when you’re absolutely confident in the legitimacy of your word, just to hit enter and have the mortifying “Not in word list” box pop up.
More than anything, though, it is obvious that Wordle is becoming a lifestyle. My friend told me about Wordle a month ago and I got hooked, so now I message my parents every morning to remind them to do it; the first out of the three of us to work out the word in one or two guesses will get a fiver. I moved back into my uni house in the middle of January and already one of my housemates is playing it religiously everyday. She’s currently in the process of getting her boyfriend to play it, too.
Wordle is like a virus- I’m pointedly ignoring any comparisons to Covid- spreading from person to person, until even people who have never expressed any interest in words will one morning find themselves waking up and reaching for their phones to enter the first five-letter word they can think of. Infected with Wordle-mania.
Mania. There’s a five-letter word with good vowels.
I’ll give it a go tomorrow.
Wordle is available to play here: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
