Josh Wardle built a word game for his girlfriend.
She liked word games. He wanted to make her something personal. So in 2021 he built Wordle — one five-letter word per day, six guesses, green tiles for right letter right place, yellow for right letter wrong place, gray for not in the word at all. He shared it with his family. Then a few friends. Then he put it on the internet.
By October 2021, 90 people were playing it. By November, 300. By December, 2,000. By January 2, 2022, 300,000 people were playing it every single day.
Three weeks later, the New York Times bought it for a price "in the low seven figures."
The thing that made it spread wasn't the game. Plenty of word games exist. It was the sharing mechanic — those little colored squares you could paste into a tweet or a text without spoiling the answer. Wordle 196 4/6. A grid of colored boxes. Everyone immediately knew what it meant. It became the first thing millions of people sent each other every morning.
There's still only one puzzle per day. Everyone on earth plays the same word. You can't binge it. You get your one shot and then you wait until tomorrow. That constraint — which would seem like a bug — turned out to be the feature. It made Wordle a shared daily ritual instead of a game you burn through and forget.
No app required. No account. No ads chasing you around the internet. You go to the site, you play your word, you share your squares, you come back tomorrow.
Josh Wardle has said he never intended to make money from it. He just wanted to make something his girlfriend would enjoy.
She did. So did 300,000 other people.
Go play today's word.