We’re sure that you have seen some of the ambiguous grey, yellow and green squares when you were scrolling through your timeline on social media.
Those squares are actually the results of a game named Wordle where the objective is to guess the secret 5-letter word of the day.
The clues come in the form of green and yellow squares which indicates whether a letter is found in the secret word or not and everyone only has 6 tries and 1 secret word per day.
Simply said, it’s something like a Mastermind game but with words.
According to the New York Times, this application is made by Brooklyn software engineer, Josh Wardle who wanted to create a game for his partner, Palak Shah.
Initially, he made a similar prototype of this game back in 2013 and showed it to his friends but they were uninterested.
Fast forward to 2020 during the pandemic, Palak and Josh were both very into the New York Times Spelling Bee and the daily crossword. With that, he thought:
“So I wanted to come up with a game that she would enjoy.”
After he made the game, he presented it to Palak and she loved it very much. The game was then spread to their relatives and it became an instant hit.
So, they decided that they would post it out for the world to play. The process was not a simple one as there are 12,000 five-letter words in the English language.
In order to narrow it down, the software engineer then made another game for Palak to cut out the more obscure ones. This brought the list down to 2,500 words.
With this, they released Wordle (a play on Josh’s last name) to the world in October 2021. 90 people played the game in October 2021 and in January 2022, the number went up to 300,000 people.
Now, Wordle has amassed a legion of more than a million daily players globally.
Well, the only player that matters for Josh is Palak and she makes sure that she plays Wordle daily. She is also very appreciative of Josh for making the game for her.
“It’s really sweet. This is definitely how Josh shows his love.”
The game has since been sold to the New York Times for more than a million dollars according to AS but NYT has assured that it would be free to play.
Well, with that amount of money, they are pretty much set for life! Did you play Wordle yet? Let us know in the comments how long your streak is!
Also read: “Without her, I won’t have this family”- Lee Chong Wei Thanks Wife For Being His Superwoman
