“Did you try ‘e’ yet? What about ‘t’?”
Testing both intellect and patience, the newly obsessive word game “Wordle” has become a worldwide sensation.
This puzzle begins with a five-letter word guess and figuring out from that attempt whether a letter is in the correct daily word. The letter will turn yellow if in the word, but in the incorrect location, and green if it is in the word and right placement.
The new East Campus has provided the Ursuline community with ending spaces for collaboration, learning and independent work. Rather than seeing students mindlessly shopping online during their free periods, though, you will find that many laptop screens are filled with blocked letters of green, yellow and dark gray.
Using every spare moment to figure out another solution to the word puzzle, Ursuline students have become engulfed in the sensation of Wordle. This daily word game has taken over the lives of not only students, but also people of all ages. My mother and many other parents have begun competing with their children in how many tries it takes to get the correct word.
This game has become not only a competitive take on knowledge, but it is also helping improve people’s memory along the way. While teenagers are using this word game as a fun way to pass time, they are improving their cognitive brain function. Research from the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry reports that “doing such puzzles improves memory, attention, the executive function of the brain and information processing.”
Wordle has been a new way for middle- and elementary-school teachers to incorporate word association into their learning. On the social media app TikTok, for example, a teacher filmed his teaching break and showed his third-grade students helping answer the Wordle of the day.
Having children learn “vowel-heavy” words and placement recognition from the puzzle game can allow them to enjoy understanding problem-solving skills at a young age. This will also help with the association that learning is exciting.
Josh Wardle, a software engineer from Brooklyn, created the daily word game at age 38. He created this game for his wife in an effort to support her love for word puzzles. The game then expanded to his family, and they quickly became fixated on solving this five-word puzzle every day. From this positive feedback, Wardle expanded the game to the public in October.
The game grew almost 300,000 people within a few months and has skyrocketed since. The “New York Times” saw the potential in this creation and bought it from Wardle for over a million dollars. After being sold, it is played more than 500 million times a day.
There is rumor that “The New York Times” bought Wordle to make it a part of their $5-a-month subscription to their games. This subscription includes their famous 80-year-old crossword, a spelling bee, titles and many other daily word games.
This rebranding and potential costliness of Wordle is a very controversial idea, and many are not happy with the “New York Times” for buying out a small entrepreneur to make more money from the common people. It seems as if their idea is to create a diehard fan base for Wordle over time and make it a part of their $1.25 weekly contribution.
With both backlash towards the “New York Times” for having two different subscriptions for their articles and games, avid Wordle players seem willing to make the game payment.
Wordle has become a game for the masses and will without a doubt stay relevant for a long period of time. Through benefiting cognitive growth and embracing a competitive edge, people of all ages should start playing this game.
As this game becomes more widespread and popular among all age groups, the question remains: would you be willing to spend a monthly payment for a daily word puzzle?
