SARAH BUITENDACH: Let’s have a word about Wordle

At 6 every morning the WhatsApps appear. From Auckland, Harare, Melbourne, River Club, Westdene, even from the other room.  

Each one of them is a riff on the same theme – a grid of little grey, green and yellow blocks. They are wordless save a score and yet the gist of their collective message is immediately apparent: we have all drunk the Wordle Kool-Aid.

My extended family – the crack-of-dawn competitors – are among more than 2-million people globally who’re caught up in the surprisingly simple storm of trying to guess what a five-letter English word is in six tries.

That we must all figure out the same word in this website challenge and are limited to one game a day means we can’t saturate ourselves in endless rounds of linguistic sleuthing and so lose interest easily. It keeps us keen. That we can share our victory or failure with the click of one button to WhatsApp or Twitter makes it unimaginably easy for even the least phone savvy to spread the W-wave.  

Wordle has been a real source of bonding for our round robin of relatives – and an inciter of mounting competition. On Monday I fell out with my sister over who came up with the winning word first. A friend and her brother are convinced their third sibling cheats. It’s a real point of side-messaging speculation. “He’s just too good for a guy who reads nothing,” she says.

Author and marketing man Khaya Dlanga is also on the Wordle train. He doesn’t see it as an especially competitive thing, unless you count challenging yourself to see how quickly you can crack it. “It’s just you against the words,” he says. “It’s like we’re detectives trying to find the killer as quickly as possible.”

Whether you’re a Watson of Wordle like Dlanga or have gone full Moriarty and are planning the downfall of someone who cleans up in two rows, all its acolytes would agree that Wordle-ing is a simple, unifying ritual that stretches your brain, but not too much. Well, everyone except those maniacs who’ve been treating it like it’s the event after bobsled at the Winter Olympics.

Google it (look for the Easter egg if you do) and you’ll find endless pieces on what the ultimate Wordle strategy is. “The algorithms” have deciphered what the perfect word to start with is, articles exclaim. It’s all very fascinating, but, if you ask me, sounds too much like hard work.

Like the Jerusalema craze, I’m sure we’ll grow tired of Wordle eventually. Only don’t tell The New York Times (NYT) that – it just bought the game from its developer, software engineer Josh Wardle, for an undisclosed seven-digit sum (a dollar one). Not too shabby given that Wardle only thought up the viral puzzle in October 2020.

From a strategic perspective this acquisition makes sense. The NYT’s games suite is a major subscription driver for the brand, and its crosswords and Spelling Bee have a devout gang of loyal followers that make Wordle look like the uncool kid in the class. A digital NYT sub is billed at $17 every four weeks and gets you all its journalism, plus all the puzzles and a separate cooking app. Games only cost $20 a year. There hasn’t been anything official yet said, but it would make sense for the currently free Wordle to join this paywalled trove.

With it the company could presumably coax more people to join its subscriber base, which is, it has to be said, already colossal. Digital subscriptions to the paper of record are at the 8.8-million mark. It also recently scooped up the hugely popular sports website The Athletic – a good way of enticing those who’re into competition beyond a grey grid.

In an announcement following The New York Times Co’s annual results last week, an ambitious statement on its growth revealed that “to further penetrate the market, the company is focused on becoming the essential subscription for every English-speaking person seeking to understand and engage with the world”.

All English speakers in the world? That’s a lot of people. But luckily someone has already calculated that if the NYT counts the 2,500 possible five-letter words to be discovered in Wordle (Wardle and his partner, Palak Shah, got rid of obscure ones), it has 6.85 years’ worth of enticement to help it reach its audacious goal. 

*Buitendach is a contributing editor to the FM