Wordle is, in theory, a very simple game: guess a five-letter word in six attempts, with colour-coded feedback after each guess. In practice, it became one of the most significant viral media events of the early 2020s — a game so perfectly matched to the Twitter sharing format that it grew from a personal gift into a global daily ritual and an eventual New York Times acquisition.
Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn-based software engineer, built the original version in 2013 but shelved it. He revived it in 2021 as a gift for his partner Palak Shah, who enjoyed word puzzles. He made it public in October 2021. The game's deliberately scarce design — one puzzle per day, no app, no accounts, no notifications — was the opposite of engagement-maximising. And that restraint was exactly what made it spread. Players could share their results as grids of coloured emoji without spoiling the answer, and those grids became a daily ritual on social feeds worldwide. By January 2022, the New York Times acquired it for a reported price in the low seven figures.
The Strategy Behind Strong Play
Wordle is a game of information extraction. The goal on each guess isn't just to land the answer — it's to gather the maximum amount of information to constrain the possibility space.
Mathematically, the optimal approach minimises the expected remaining possibilities after each guess. Information theory (specifically, Shannon entropy) gives us a principled way to rank starting words: the best openers are those whose colour patterns, across all possible answer words, most evenly partition the remaining candidate set.
In practice, this means:
- Start with a high-frequency opener. Words like CRANE, STARE, RAISE, or SLATE test common letters (E, A, R, T, S, N, I, O, C, L) in strong positions. Avoid rare letters (X, Z, Q, J) on guess 1.
- Use guess 2 to probe remaining common letters. After your opener, you'll have eliminated several letters. A good second word tests a fresh set — for example, after CRANE, a useful second guess might cover O, S, T, L, I.
- Respect position information. A yellow tile means the letter is in the word but not there. Don't guess it in the same position again — that wastes a try.
- Avoid duplicate letters early. Until you've confirmed a letter appears twice, guesses with repeated letters (like SPEED) test fewer unique letters per attempt.
Why Hard Mode Is Different
In standard mode, you're free to guess any valid word even if it contradicts known information — this lets you probe new letters quickly. In Hard mode (the original NYT setting), you must use revealed hints in every subsequent guess. This means you're forced into progressively more constrained guesses, which can lead to "trap" situations where 4 of 5 letters are known but the final letter has many possibilities (e.g., _IGHT: might, night, fight, light, right, sight, tight, wight). Hard mode forces you to guess through each possibility one at a time rather than testing multiple candidates in one guess.