What is Wordle and why has it caught the attention of everyone on Twitter?

Wordle: A player has six chances to guess the word of the day that the website has picked.

Wordle, a five-letter word game has the internet hooked. If you’re on Twitter, chances are that you have seen people on your timeline sharing a box with grey, yellow and green tiles, with a score.

The addictive word-guessing game appears simple. A player has six chances to guess the word of the day that the website has picked.

Here's how Wordle is played:

After each guess, the colour of the tiles will change to show how close a player’s guess was to the word. A green tile indicates the letter is correct and in the correct position. A yellow tile means the letter is in the answer but not in the right spot, and a grey tile shows that the letter is incorrect.

Click here to play Wordle.

The game was created by software engineer Josh Wardle. He created Wordle (an obvious wordplay on his surname) for his partner Palak Shah who loves word games before launching it on the internet last October, according to a New York Times report. In no time, the game picked up online, with thousands of people being obsessed about it.

The free game gained global popularity after the “share” feature was enabled in December.

After the overwhelming success of the game, Wardle said he has fixed a long-standing bug in Wordle's puzzle selection code that was causing people in certain time zones, such as Australia and New Zealand, to get the incorrect puzzle.

A byproduct of this change is that affected users may skip a puzzle. E.g. If you played #204 yesterday you may end up with #206 today. I am sorry to deprive you of a Wordle. 2/2

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— Josh Wardle (@powerlanguish) January 10, 2022

Wardle has previously worked with Reddit, where he created the then-popular projects, The Button and Place. He has also worked with image sharing platform Pinterest for close to two years.

Wardle, who lives in Brooklyn, graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2006 and earned a master’s degree the University of Oregon.