A new trend has taken Berkeley High School (BHS), as well as the rest of the world, by storm. Wordle is an online word game in which players attempt to guess the daily five-letter word within six tries. Although it came out in October of 2021, Wordle didn’t blow up to its grand scale until much more recently. Anyone can participate on their own device for free, which is part of Wordle's appeal.
Unlike many online games and apps today, Wordle is not targeted solely at youth. Many adults play it as well. Elise Nudel, for example, heard about the game through her mom.
“A lot of my mom’s Facebook friends played it,” Nudel said. “They would post their answers on Facebook, so she got me into it.”
Lately, however, social media has upset many invested players due to its ability to spoil the word of the day. Just recently, according to the Washington Post, Twitter suspended an account for spoiling the solution to the next day’s Wordle.
The idea of spoiling someone’s fun for no good reason is displeasing to many. Kate Badoud, a junior in Academic Choice (AC), shared that she has been playing Wordle every day since she heard about it. When asked whether she had heard about online incidences like these previously, she said, “No, but how dare they?”
Elise Nudel, also a junior in AC, added onto this.
“I actually did not know that people post the answers,” she said. “But when you get the word, there’s a share option, so a lot of my friends will send me their answers. But I think it’s messed up if you spoil the word.”
For the majority of BHS students that were asked, spoiler accounts weren’t the focus. Rather, they seem to enjoy the pleasure that 30 minutes of word-puzzling a day gives them.
“My favorite thing about it is that it’s always a five-letter word and it’s pretty easy to guess,” Nudel said. “It’s usually a well-known word, so it’s not just totally weird.”
In late January of 2021, 14 percent of US adults said they played Wordle daily, according to Statista. In January of 2022, Twitter revealed that Wordle had been mentioned more than 840,000 times across the platform since its release in October 2021.
The game has by no means gained its hype by coincidence. If it's a distraction, a mental challenge, or simply a spark of joy, Wordle is most certainly beloved by many.
“It makes you think,” Badoud said when asked what drew her to it. Other students added on to this, saying they "think it’s so popular because people can prove how smart they are to each other in a friendly way.”The joy coming from playing Wordle is as simple as the game itself.