Wordle: one shared word a day; the emoji score grid goes viral and NYT buys it

In early 2021, Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle built a tiny web game for himself and his partner, Palak Shah, a word-game fan; the couple had been getting through lockdown on Spelling Bee and crosswords, and Wardle wanted a shared puzzle of their own. Wordle gives every player the same five-letter word once a day, with six guesses; letters turn gray, yellow or green to mark what you got right. He shared it with family, then put it on the open web in October 2021.

The twist that made it social: after the sixth guess, the game renders your result as a small grid of colored squares — Wordle 203 3/6 — that shows how well you did without revealing the word. That made the outcome safe to post on Twitter and in family group chats, where daily scores became a low-stakes ritual during Covid isolation. Wardle also refused the standard mobile-game playbook: no ads, no account, no email signup, no push notifications, no endless replays.

Growth was sudden: the game picked up steam from October 2021 and had more than 2.7 million daily players by 10 January 2022, per NPR. On 31 January 2022 the New York Times announced it had acquired Wordle for an undisclosed price in the low seven figures, saying the game would initially remain free; Apple removed lookalike clones from the App Store, and the game joined the Times' suite of daily puzzles.