Five blank spaces.

26 letters.

Six tries.

It’s time to guess the daily word and complete the Wordle in the fewest attempts possible.

Almost everyone has tried or at least heard of the new trending word game Wordle. The hype around this game has grown tremendously in the past weeks to the point where it is appearing on news channels, late-night shows, and Pascack Valley students’ computers. 

Wordle was created by Josh Wardle, a British engineer in Brooklyn who released the game in mid-October, and only four months later Wordle has grown to a worldwide wonder with over three million daily players. The game was recently sold to the New York Times for over $1 million.

Players have six tries to guess the mystery word of the day. When the letter is in the word but not in the right spot, the square turns yellow. When there is a correct letter in the right spot, the square turns green until the player gets the word, and all squares turn green.

At PV, it’s hard to find a student who doesn’t know about Wordle. It spread quickly through the halls and became a hot topic for conversation, and it has become increasingly harder for the students to get it done before the daily word is spoiled for them.

The game only releases one puzzle a day, leaving addicted players to go elsewhere to continue puzzling. 

There have even been people so inspired by the idea of Wordle that they created their own. A few Taylor Swift fans created Taylordle, a Wordle for fans to guess a word that is related to the artist. 

Wordle Archive was created by Devang Thakkar, a doctoral student at Duke University who gathered all the past Wordles to allow players to venture back and play with the old Wordles.

And for the math nerds out there, Nerdle is an eight-space random math equation to keep you busy as well as Mathler, with six spaces to create a PEMDAS equation equal to a new magic number each day.

Globle is a fun new version where players try to guess the country. When players enter the name of a country, it lights up on the globe in different colors depending on how geographically close the guess was to the mystery country.

English Teacher Matthew Morone first introduced the original game to his students in January and shared his opinions and his strategies with his students.

“I first heard about Wordle from an article that talked about how there was a word game that a coder made for his partner as a romantic gesture,” Morone said. “Little did he know that it would blow up as this big social media sensation.” 

After a brief stint of Wordle becoming blocked on the school computers, the English department fought hard to gain back the daily game.

“The big concern as an English teacher is always engagement with language,” Morone said. “[To] me, literacy can take a lot of different forms, [and] if anyone is playing with language to see how it works, then to me, it is an educational tool. If it happens to be really fun, then even better.”

Even as time went on Wordle is still popular in the PV community, and students are still engaged with the game and sharing their thoughts amoung the rest of the students.