Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
ATLANTA — One word. Five letters. Six tries. Countless moments of triumph and dismay.
Wordle — the daily word game that became a cultural phenomenon during the pandemic — released its 1,000th puzzle on Friday.
For some, Wordle is a fun way to pass the time. For others, it requires rigorous thought and strategy. The premise is simple (guess the word) and yet can be highly competitive. How many tries did it take you? Have you optimized your starting word for maximum impact? Do you play in Hard Mode, where you need to use the letters you've already found in each subsequent guess?
Wordle's balance of simple, fun competition quickly resonated with players. Within two months of its public release in October 2021, the number of daily users shot from 90 to around 300,000. After the New York Times acquired Wordle from its creator, software engineer Josh Wardle, in January 2022, its player base grew to tens of millions.
There's a lot of strategy behind the puzzle, as well. From the words the Times picks to Wordle's place in the publication's business model, everything has its purpose.
What happens behind the scenes on the Wordle team
For players, the Wordle experience is fairly simple. You navigate to the web page or open the NYT Games app, and plug in your starter word. On the back end, it's far more complicated.
Initially, Wardle curated a list of words that would run in order. While the Times still uses that list for the most part, it has since been adjusted to ensure each word meets the Times' standards and is in North American spelling — something that won't be changing anytime soon, according to Everdeen Mason, the editorial director for NYT Games.
"I know some of our international audience hates that," she admitted to CNN.
Even having a set list of words isn't enough. The New York Times assigned a dedicated editor for Wordle, Tracy Bennett, in November 2022.
"Wardle's original word list forms the bulk of the database of words we're accessing, though we're not running them in the order he had originally arranged them," Bennett told CNN. "I've removed a handful of words that felt too obscure or vulgar, or that had derogatory secondary meanings, but those have been few and far between."
Then, the strategy comes in.
Bennett works in weeklong batches, about a month in advance. She spends around two hours a week setting up the seven words that will run.
To start, Bennett randomly selects words from the database using "a variety of methods." She then researches each word for its current and historical meanings before mentally running through each word's letter combinations "to identify any that are 'lucky guess' words that defy strategy."
These lucky guess words include things like _OUND, where there are more than six letters that could occupy the first slot, Bennett said.
Once she has the words for that week, Bennett checks them again to make sure that the order of the puzzles makes sense. This includes ensuring that there aren't too many hard words or similar words in a row.
"That's how we think about it," said Mason. "As a solver playing every single day for a week period, how does that feel? Is it fun? Is it challenging enough?"
Yes, player feedback makes a difference
Wordle's 1,000th puzzle was one of the words switched out from Wardle's original lineup, but more because the original was "a little boring," Mason said.
The Times didn't theme the new word either, after Bennett experimented with a themed Wordle related to Thanksgiving — FEAST — in her first month on the job.
"We got a resounding response from the audience that they did not like that at all," said Mason. "I think it just made it too easy."
Bennett said that some solvers enjoyed the thematic nod, but others felt it broke the rules of Wordle because it added an element of guessing what the editor might pick.
While the Times sometimes has a nod to current events in its other games, such as the crossword, there's more context overall. "With Wordle, it's just one word," Mason said. "We were actually surprised that people were so mad about it."
The game's core experience — six tries to guess a five letter word — is something that users don't want the Times to mess with, Jonathan Knight, the business head for NYT Games, told CNN.
"The most requested feature for Wordle is don't do anything," he said.
The second most requested feature is an archive, so players can go back and try puzzles that they missed or didn't solve the first time around. This is in the works, Knight said. While the Times doesn't have a date for the rollout, it plans to release the Wordle archive this year.
Aside from the editorial strategy, Wordle fits perfectly into the Times' business plans. "Our lifestyle products are really a key part of that strategy," said Knight.
For online games like Wordle, which is available for free — on purpose — it's an opportunity to funnel players to a paid subscription, either to access more of the Times' games or convert them to news readers.
How a simple word puzzle has fostered connections — and competition
Sometimes, a word is more than just a word. It can evoke connection, vulnerability or challenge.
People connect over Wordle, from commiserating over how hard the day's word was to sharing how many tries it took to solve it.
The most common time to play Wordle in the U.S. is 9 a.m., according to the Times.
For Donna Cona, who has played it since before the Times acquisition, Wordle has become her go-to thing each morning. Although she admits that it "drives me crazy when I'm stumped … and it's usually because I'm always suspect of using the same letter twice in a word."
"I've rarely missed a day," said Cona, who still looks forward to her "every morning Wordle ritual," and whose friends and family share photos of their completed Wordles as a way to stay connected.
"I like how this very simple game has become this mental exercise for people to not just guess the word of the day but put a lot of meaning into it," said Mason.
Editor's note: All Wordle player data was provided exclusively to CNN by the New York Times and is accurate as of March 11, 2024.
