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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Emma Graham-Harrison and Dan Milmo

Urdu, Chinese, even Old Norse: how Wordle spread across the globe

Wordle
Wordle is wildly popular in English but programmers are showing ingenuity in adapting it to other languages. Photograph: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock

It only took two days for Louan Bengmah’s French-language version of the viral Wordle game to run into trouble. His online dictionary threw up “slush”, Québécois slang that was essentially an English word co-opted in North America.

French players hoping to join the hundreds of thousands of English speakers cluttering up social media with boastful grids showing how quickly they had guessed a mystery word, were frustrated.

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