What The Hell Is Wordle – And How Do You Play It? - Time Out

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NewsWhat the hell is Wordle – and how do you play it?

Those little green, yellow and grey squares, debunked

Written by Ed CunninghamNews Editor, UKTuesday 11 January 2022ShareCopy LinkFacebookTwitterPinterestEmailWhatsAppAdvertising

They’ve been popping up on your Twitter feed for weeks. Little grids of yellow, green and grey squares, presented on timelines without any explanation whatsoever by celebs and normies alike. What on earth does it all mean?

The game is Wordle, and the aim is to try and guess a five-letter word in six attempts. Here’s how it works:

You guess a valid five-letter word. If it comes up green, the letter is both correct and correctly placed in the word. If a letter comes up yellow, it means it’s in the word but not where you’ve placed it. If a letter comes up grey, it isn’t in the word at all. Moving on to the next row, you then keep guessing and whittle down the remaining letters. If you don’t get it after six attempts, you fail.

The grid changes once per day, so you don’t need to worry about getting hooked and wasting an afternoon blitzing through every level. It’s also really simple to play, as there’s no app to download or anything like that – it’s just a website. Head over to Wordle.com to get guessing on today’s grid.

Wordle was made by Josh Wardle, a software engineer from New York. When it was released in October, it had only 90 players. As of last week, the site has been logging more than 300,000 daily players.

Also, if you do get the day’s Wordle right, you don’t have to share it on Twitter. That’s just for show-offs.

Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.

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