What’s the good Wordle?

By Jenna Amatulli

March 9, 2022

In this week’s issue, writer and editor Jenna Amatulli explores why the word game phenomenon Wordle isn’t just about words — it’s about communication. But first, if you aren't subscribed to The Distance, please sign up here. Now, here’s Jenna:

Odds are high that you’ve clocked the yellow and green boxes dominating Twitter or Facebook in recent weeks; the odds are slightly lower, perhaps (but still high), that you’ve since discovered they’re indicative of a fun new game called Wordle. And maybe you’ve become compelled to share yellow and green boxes of your own.

Wherever you are on your Wordle journey, one thing is clear: Wordle’s appeal is rooted in our very language, and in our desire to communicate. That gives it long-term relevance — it’s here to stay.

“I think everybody relates to Wordle because [presumably all players are] speakers of English and thus we all have expertise in the game,” independent research linguist Danny Hieber told me recently. Hieber is currently working with the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana to help revitalize their indigenous language and, in January, his linguistic insights went viral on TikTok when he posted about Wordle. He emphasized to us that because English-speakers “have an intuitive understanding of letter frequencies in English and how letters are allowed to be arranged,” the game is “a fun way to test how well we can make that implicit knowledge explicit.”

The look of Wordle, he says, doesn’t hurt either: Beyond it simply being “beautifully-designed,” Hieber gushed that it’s a “smooth, straightforward, fun game, with an easy way to share results with friends without spoilers.”

In the event that the word “Wordle” still sounds like gobbledegook to you, let’s backtrack: Towards the end of 2021, a software engineer named Josh Wardle created the game from scratch as a gift for his partner, Palak Shah, after the pair had taken a liking to Spelling Bee, the anagram puzzle created by the New York Times, during the pandemic. And despite its humble, personal beginnings, it quickly found an audience and became a phenomenon.

Playing Wordle is a simple enough concept, which is arguably what gives it such widespread appeal. The game gives you a fresh series of five blank boxes every day, with each box corresponding to a letter. For every word you guess, the boxes will turn a certain color to tell you whether each letter is in the word and in the right place, not in the word, or in the word but not in the right place. The catch is that you only get six guesses to figure out the word of the day, though the main objective is to guess the word in the fewest tries. Another caveat: if you want to play the game for hours on end, you can’t. Wardle engineered it to only drop once a day because — as he told the Times, to whom he later sold the game’s rights — it “doesn’t want any more of your time.”

To simply call Wordle the latest new craze in gaming would be selling it short. Other than the occasional hit TV show (think Lost, Game of Thrones, Succession), few things have grabbed the attention of the masses like Wordle has. Celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Questlove, and even the “Mayor of Flavortown,” Guy Fieri, play it. Enough people have wondered aloud about how to master Wordle that reporters have spoken to experts in an attempt to identify the best starting word. A woman’s life was even saved as a result of her Wordle behaviors, which included texting her daily Wordle results to her daughter.

Wordle has taken on its own life force, one that’s only picking up steam.

As we mentioned earlier, many Wordle users have taken to excitedly posting their results on Twitter every day with a subtle caption or the more succinct: Wordle 147 3/6. A seemingly nonsensical assortment of numbers, this indicates, first, which Wordle puzzle the results refer to (e.g. “147” refers to the 147th puzzle that’s been published) and, second, that the player guessed the word of the day in three out of the six guesses.

While some may not understand why one would want to share a seemingly small win on social media, Katy Pearce, an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington broke it down quite succinctly in Vox: “I don’t share when I fail a Wordle, including this morning. But when I do okay on a Wordle, my sharing is signaling that I’m part of the broader intellectual Wordle community.”

“We’re all looking to be accepted and included and how better to achieve that than by sharing a few boxes on a screen, prompting others in the know to chime in and start a conversation?”

Pearce’s positive feelings brought on by sharing her good Wordle scores aren’t unique. Others within the steadily growing herd of Wordle sharers on social media have echoed her sentiments, including poet Harry Baker. We noticed Baker shared his scores on Twitter, and he told me via email that he has such an affection for the game that he even has a WhatsApp group “with friends where we all share our joys/failings every morning.” He says it keeps the group “in daily contact and I love that it has brought us closer together” — this regular communication has potential long-term benefits, as The Distance discussed in a past issue about friendship.

Baker also told us he enjoys seeing other people’s scores and was compelled to post his own when he finally guessed a Wordle in only two tries and “wanted to celebrate!”

Who among us can’t relate to that? We’re all looking to be accepted and included and how better to achieve that than by sharing a few boxes on a screen, prompting others in the know to chime in and start a conversation? Plus, if we can show off a little bit of linguistic genius in the process, let’s not underestimate the minor dopamine hit of a humblebrag.

Now, of course, for every ten people who enjoy posting their Wordle wins on social media, there are twenty who despise it. “Stop sharing your Wordle score, we don’t wanna see it,” wrote one person in late February. “No one — I promise you: no one — cares about your Wordle score,” wrote another that same month.

To those people, we encourage them to find hobbies that bring them happiness and we’ll stick with Hieber’s viewpoint.

“Humans can't help but add meaning, individuality, and artistry to their world, and how people approach Wordle is a beautiful illustration of that at work. People love to take Wordle and make it their own,” he told me, before adding: “Live and let Wordle!”

Jenna Amatulli is an editor and reporter based out of Brooklyn, NY. She’s currently the deputy editor at Jezebel and an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

A bold argument in which I attempt to get you excited to wait in line

Alex writes:

Almost ten years ago, I encountered this article by Matthew J. X. Malady, and it’s stuck with me — profoundly — ever since. The premise: “waiting in line” is a truly great social innovation, one that has helped define and mold our culture for the past 200 years. (Shockingly, the first historical description of a “modern” line dates back only to 1837, in writing by Thomas Carlyle!) While getting stuck in a long one might be a bummer, the fact that lines function the way they do is a testament to our society’s enshrinement of fairness, equality, and democracy. I’ll defer to Malady:

“Because lines tend to be composed of fully aware, self-regulating human beings who don’t take kindly to cheating or attempts to favor one group over others — the wealthy over the poor, for instance, or the tech-savvy over the not-tech-savvy — it has always been difficult to connive your way to the front. Lines, in this way, can function as society’s great equalizer.”

The psychological phenomenon of waiting in line has even lent itself to fine works of art and philosophy. The great writer David Foster Wallace used the premise of queueing up at a grocery store (the patience, the poise, the surrender) as the emotional grounding for “This is Water,” a deeply moving commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College, and which has since become one of his most widely beloved works.

But these days, as technology and capital aim to innovate everywhere, all the time, we’re also faced with a surprisingly pressing question: Can we make waiting in line better without also undermining its fundamental virtues?

No doubt you’re familiar with some of the more pernicious attempts to transform line-waiting. Generally, these take the form of opportunities for people to pay to bypass the obligation to wait in line — a direct contradiction to the idea that lines are a universal equalizer, inherently divorced from the usual trappings of class or privilege. Other cases are more complicated, admittedly. At the airport, for instance, TSA PreCheck makes some sense, as those people fast-tracked have registered as, well, pre-screened.

On the other hand, you may have noticed something else at the security check, as you stumbled along, fumbling belt and shoes: Yet another tier of line hierarchy, a program called Clear. If you find yourself raising a dubious eyebrow, there’s good reason. Clear’s slick branding — going beyond the sober, logical alternative of TSA PreCheck — feels like a direct affront to the idea of a classless line. And, yes, it’s expensive.

In a past life, I worked for a software company that designed a tool that helped databases achieve higher productivity and speed. One of the mathematical principles that undergirded the technology we engineered was a concept called “queueing theory” — a deeper understanding of why some lines move faster than others. This is known as throughput.

Understanding throughput is what leads to evolutions in line structures and even etiquette, without needing to overturn the basic rules that make lines work. For instance, a study of the London Underground found that if people simply stood on both sides of a station escalator — as opposed to leaving space on one side for people to walk — the overall speed of all passengers would dramatically increase.

Similarly, the express checkout line at the grocery store will virtually always be fastest, even if it looks dramatically longer. The key variable? The number of registers checking people out, increasing throughput and diminishing the impact of any one, especially slow customer clogging the process.

Lines may not be exciting, per se, but that’s kind of the point. As recent reports circulate about Disneyland’s new overwrought, pay-to-pass line system making “life a living hell,” just remember: to wait in line is a virtue. It is sophisticated. It is just.

And never trust a cutter, those anarchists. What is this, 1836?

Be honest: Do you always follow the rule of the line? Why or why not?
What other social systems or etiquettes do you consider especially valuable?
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The Distance is supported by Fundrise, edited by Alex Slotnick and Helen Chandler, and produced by Katie Valavanis and Brett Wilson, with help from Motasem Halawani. Our design director is Erin Culliney.