10 Things I Learned by Playing Wordle

Weird things I have learned by playing (and googling around) the new smash hit game Wordle…

1. The guy who invented WORDLE is called WARDLE. Seriously. That’s his last name. He’s from WALES. You can’t make this stuff up.

2. You can blow peoples’ minds by suggesting you always start with two words with common, un-repeated letters (like CLEAN RIOTS, which together contain the ten most common letters in the English language), regardless of whether you get any hits in the first word or not. This strategy relies on the idea that it’s better to know which letters you’re working with than where exactly they fall. Mind. Blown.

3. Some letter combinations only appear in certain places in an English word, and that’s often symmetrical: You can start a word with TR or end it with RT but not the reverse; same for GN/NG, BL/LB, and more. Cool.

4. DONNA is a word, not just a name. As in “Prima Donna”. That stumped me.

5. It’s really hard for me to guess UNION for some reason. Too many vowels.

6. If you need, just need, more WORDLEs in your life than one-a-day, go here.

7. People get weirdly proud about their WORDLE scores. But why? If you got it on the first try, everyone would agree it was pure dumb luck. Yet if you can’t get it in 6 tries, people look at you like something might be wrong with you. Where’s the line between luck and skill? I reckon (but cannot prove) there’s no significant correlation with linguistic intelligence for scores of 3, 4 or 5. (But I still feel inordinately proud of myself when I get it in 3.)

8. If Scrabble and Mastermind had a baby, they’d call it Wordle. Ahhhh.

9. If you think this can’t be the first time anyone thought of this game, you’d be right. The game JOTTO pre-dates it, and that was the inspiration for a tv show called LINGO. But Wordle does seem to be the prettiest version.

10. I’ll never look at yellow and green squares the same way again. It’s like Tetris. This stuff makes an impression.