I scored a two in Wordle the other day. God. The rush, as the five squares in the second line blinked green, one by one, touched on the sublime. I felt like Mary Magdalen in the Caravaggio painting, lost in ecstasy. Oh mama.
Up until this point, I had considered that those who found the solution in two guesses were simply lucky. Consistent threes and fours – this was a surer marker of Wordle prowess. Once I had scored a two myself, however, I began to doubt this hypothesis. Surely, only the most elite players could manage such a feat. Surely, I was now part of this pantheon.
How did I do it, I hear ye mortals enquire? How did I reach ROBOT in two? Why, a combination of stellar start word (RATES), impeccable logic and a poetic appreciation of the Wordle lexicon, which appears to offer an oblique commentary on 21st life (TROLL… PROXY… PRICK…). No doubt this has helped the internet word puzzle to become, as one Twitter wag put it, “The sourdough starter of Omicron”, spreading at the same speed as its companion variant. According to the (non-affiliated) account @WordleStats, the number of people sharing their Wordle scores was roughly doubling each week in January: from 137,586 on 12 January to 280,622 on 19 January. This is just the people who are sharing their scores; there are perhaps millions more, Wordling in private. Not since the Sudoku-mania of the mid-00s, or perhaps even the first crossword craze of the 1910s, has a novel puzzle so captured the zeitgeist.
The Wordle origin story is already part of the nano-mythology of the internet – it was designed by the British programmer, Josh Wardle, as a present for his girlfriend, Palak Shah, who was a fan of the New York Times’s Spelling Bee game. The beauty lies in its simplicity. You have to guess a five-letter word. You have six guesses. It would be addictive were the entire English-speaking world not rationed to a single hit per day. “One puzzle a day with exactly one solution. There is something almost religious about it, no?” wrote the American author Brandon Taylor in an essay on his Substack newsletter. “There is something peculiarly Calvinist about Wordle, or perhaps Wordle illuminates something particularly Calvinist about digital scarcity.” I logged on to Twitter to proselytise my miracle score – only to be confronted by a guy who had got it in one. A total fluke, obviously.
What is it about these silly games that compels us so? Why do I experience a little rush of joy, each day, when I remember there’s still the Wordle to do? Alan Connor, author of Two Girls, One on Each Knee, a history of the crossword, notes that the pandemic has provided the perfect conditions for an upsurge of interest in word games of all kinds. “It’s no surprise that those who have had more time alone should see the appeal in losing themselves in a puzzle for a spell, but it also works for those who’ve been run off their feet: a puzzle is, at least, something you can feel you’ve finished.”
Connor sees Wordle as a “charming gateway” to the world of “moving letters around for the sheer pleasure of it”, but it is far from the only distraction we have turned to. The crossword setters and puzzle compilers he knows report that they’ve never had so much interest. Publications from the Sun to the Telegraph to the New Yorker have upped their puzzle content in recent months – and this was from a position of strength. On the 100th anniversary of the crossword in 2013, Connor commissioned a YouGov survey on the popularity of the crossword and found that three in 10 British adults attempted a crossword each week and more than one in five made their decision to buy a newspaper based on the particular crossword culture of the publication. The solution to the clue that forms the title of his book is PATELLA, by the way.
Like so many word puzzles, Wordle is really a numbers game masquerading as a letters game, according to mathematician Alex Bellos, Guardian puzzle compiler and author of the Language Lover’s Puzzle Book. “You’ll find that the people who are really brilliant at word games are mathematical. It’s quite often maths graduates who win the international Scrabble competitions and set cryptic crosswords.”
The crucial strategy is that of “exhaustion”, he says – which is maybe why I’m so good at it. No, not that sort of exhaustion: “You have a finite number of solutions and you have to exhaustively look at every permutation and combination. It’s a natural instinct for mathematicians. You also have to be drawn to the non-human, a bit like a robot, working through letters in every different position.”
Yet really successful puzzle games seem to share certain irresistible human elements, too – competition, status-seeking and superstition. Everyone Bellos knows has now arrived at a favourite first word, he says. “They are probably quite protective of them, too. They’re almost like lucky charms.”
The author Laura Shepherd-Robinson tells me she used to have RATIO as her starter word. “Then I made the mistake of telling my husband,” she says. “He would work backwards from that knowledge when he saw my little yellow and green score on Twitter. So I’ve had to mix it up now. He is insufferable if he gets it in two or three.”
My own feeling is that word games – like chord sequences, like chess, like translating a Russian sonnet into English while retaining the same metrical form – lie in the sweetspot between maths and art, logic and creativity, left brain and right. It’s the same metaphysical zone in which you would find Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, containing books with every possible permutation of 25 characters arranged over 410 pages of 40 lines each. Somewhere, amid the apparent randomness of the seemingly indefinite but not quite infinite library, there must exist a book containing the key to the universe. And also, its refutation.
Word games are “about breaking meaning down to its atomic units,” says Adrienne Raphel, author of Thinking Inside the Box, a history of word puzzles. “When they are put together the letters make sense – but pull them apart and they have a different kind of elemental power. It taps into the primal instinct that we have where we see letters and we have to play with them.” Letter blocks are, of course, one of the first toys we give to toddlers.
When Raphel first encountered Wordle, she was struck by the grid’s similarity to the Roman “magic square”, one of the earliest and most enduring of word games. A magic square is a grid of letters where the words read the same across as they do down. In English, magic squares of up to nine letters across have been constructed. A 10x10 is seen as the holy grail. But the most famous example is the SATOR 5x5 square, a palindrome, which reads: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (roughly: “farmer Arepo works with a wheel”). It is one of the most common forms of Roman graffiti, turning up everywhere from Pompeii to Syria to Cirencester but its meaning is unknown. It may have been a charm for warding off evil spirits, or a way for early Christians to signal their presence to one another. “In Roman times, people delighted in the idea of remixing the same letters and getting new words,” Raphel says. “It must have seemed magical.”
She detects similar properties in the game Boggle, in which the player must find the words snaking through a 4x4 grid of random letters. “It’s the magic feeling of creating a chaos of symbol, from which patterns emerge. People think of it as this junior cousin to Scrabble – I actually think Scrabble is inferior.” Maya Angelou would have been with her – the great poet was a Boggle nut and held regular tournaments in her Harlem home.
But as a recovering Scrabble addict (I developed a seriously bad online habit in the mid-00s) I would maintain that Scrabble has its own life lessons to impart. A rookie player will often fixate on the word they can nearly make with their tiles, or moan about the constraints of the board. “Can’t make a thing with these darned letters!” they will cry. But the darned letters are the point. You must operate on the board in front of you with the constraints that you have. As in life.
There is, of course, great art to creating a puzzle – just as there is a science to creating a perfect rhyme. “A good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped that a mystery story can,” said Stephen Sondheim, who compiled cryptic crosswords. “It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.” Vladimir Nabokov composed chess problems and saw them in much the same way. “Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterise all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity and splendid insincerity.” He additionally published the first known crosswords in Russian, admiring “their geometric, closed structure… reminiscent of chess”.
One could begin to think that word games were the stuff of life itself. Or, perhaps, the inverse, an enormous waste of life. There’s something rather disturbing about the relish with which the husband in Brief Encounter attacks his Times crossword while poor Celia Johnson pines away. Connor points out that there was once a moral panic about the crossword – “coming here from America and wasting workers’ time” – before it became seen as a respectable, intellectual pastime.
But in the 21st century – and this would be a very 21st century way of seeing things – we are more apt to see these things as means of “optimising” ourselves to ever-greater efficiency. Shepherd-Robinson canvasses her online group of writers (all Wordle nuts) and finds them split on the matter. Some see Wordle as just another form of procrastination. She, and many others, however, see it as a “warm-up exercise” for the day’s intellectual labours. “Wordle uses the same part of my brain that I’m using when I’m really wrestling with a plot,” she says. Essentially, it’s a logic problem, isn’t it? You are narrowing the path to the right answer. That’s exactly how I approach a book.”
Even if it is a form of timewasting, though, it’s a relatively safe one, given that you have to wait 24 hours for each new puzzle. This is entirely deliberate. Wardle had worked in Silicon Valley, where software designers typically try to capture as much of your attention as they possibly can: by making the game endless, by sending you constant push notifications, by encouraging you to collect “gems” or build your “streak” (see: Duolingo, Simply Piano, the ghastly official Scrabble app, etc). “Philosophically, I enjoy doing the opposite of all those things… which I think has bizarrely had this effect where the game feels really human and just enjoyable,” he told Slate.
This is what the author Brandon Taylor was driving at in his essay on Wordle. The internet once promised to be a space of boundless freedom, where we could each be fully ourselves. Social media has, however, brought about something like the opposite. As soon as anyone shares something interesting or funny or clever or cool, others imitate it and soon everyone is tweeting the same memes, idioms and ideas. Everyone is always “optimising” whether they realise it or not. As such, Taylor resists any temptation to share his first word, his score or his strategy. “I don’t want to be a replicant. I don’t want to be a cyborg. I don’t want to be just like everyone else, playing the same words and solving the puzzle in the same way.” He wants to do it in his own dumb way. Which seems pretty smart to me.
And in short bursts, a word game can offer a respite from the endless imperatives of ambition, competition, optimisation. “When language is so often weaponised and over-scrutinised, it can be hugely curative to turn words into nothing more than pieces in a game,” says Connor. Bellos sees such games as the mental equivalent of isolating a muscle in the gym. “It’s pure concentration,” he says. “And when you do enter this cocoon of concentration, you forget about everything else in the world. You’re focused on this one small, elegant, aesthetically pleasing thing. For a few minutes, it’s a beautiful world.” He stops himself. “God, I sound pretentious.”
