Wordle’s puzzling appeal

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: word games.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Love word games! I’ll give The New York Times its due. I never miss the crossword. And I’ll say something else about the Times, it doesn’t miss an opportunity. The Times just snapped up the newest word game that’s the talk of the internet.

REICHARD: Right, it’s called Wordle and it has a whole bunch of young people hooked. WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown takes us behind the trend.

SRIVASTAVA: I go to Rice. I’m a sophomore there.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN, REPORTER: Anusha Srivastava isn’t a word nerd. She’s not an English major, and she’s not studying literature.

SRIVASTAVA: I’m actually a chemical engineering major.

But the first time Srivastava played Wordle, she was hooked.

SRIVASTAVA: I'm obsessed with it.

Wordle. Deceptively simple but sneakily addictive. After its launch in November, the online word game spread like wildfire, ensnaring devoted fans left and right. The game went from 90 users a day to 3 million in about three months. And it’s mostly Millennials: 26 percent of that generation play Wordle, compared to 18 percent of Gen Zers.

Every day on Wordle, users get a new five-letter word to guess. You have six chances to get it right.

SRIVASTAVA: You put in a five letter guess, into the first row and it will tell you which letters of your word are either completely wrong, or in the wrong place, but the right letter, or they're in the right place in the right letter. And so they have gray, yellow, and green that correspond to those.

If you guess correctly—congratulations! You can share your grid of gray, yellow, and green boxes on social media. If you get it wrong, well, you can try again tomorrow.

MAHAND: There's only one puzzle each day.

Melinda Mahand is a word nerd. A writer and editor and the academic dean at Franklin Classical School in Franklin, Tennessee. She says limited quantity is part of Wordle’s appeal: You can’t just go down a never-ending rabbit hole of Wordles.

MAHAND: So you have a brief amount of challenge. And then pretty quick satisfaction and you're done for the day.

Mahand says that combination of challenge and satisfaction is crucial and part of the addictive nature of any word game. Not just Wordle.

MAHAND: Any time we're looking at someone learning something new. If a task is too easy, completing it does not give satisfaction. And if we don't experience satisfaction, there's not a deep desire to repeat what we just tried. But if a task has enough challenge that we have to learn a little something, and we have to work hard at it but we ultimately achieve that task and succeed in that task, that gives satisfaction. And it is that challenge/satisfaction cycle that people want to repeat and repeat. It feels good.

People like word games. Always have.

MAHAND: Word puzzles have been a part of the human race for as far back as we have any record of. The Old Norse used puns in their literature. The Anglo Saxons used metaphors and kennings, which are a type of word puzzle. And that tradition has come down through the years.

Annis Shaver says word games are part of human nature. Shaver heads up the English lit and modern languages department at Cedarville University.

SHAVER: We like to play with our language. And when we play with our language, in manipulating it, we're making things new and different. We're creating new words. We're approaching ideas from a different perspective.

Shaver says word games aren’t just fun…they’re useful.

SHAVER: They help us not only with vocabulary, but help us with spelling, and to understand the way that our language works with the combinations of vowels and the combinations of consonants that are possible with our language. It helps us also to understand limits. All languages have limits. There are only certain combinations that work and we learn that and reinforce that the more we work with these games.

Word games are also good for mental exercise and building concentration…and of course, bulking up your vocabulary. Anusha Srivastava says she’s learned quite a few new words.

SRIVASTAVA: I see a lot of words that I've read before, but I don't really know what they mean only in the context of certain sentences. Like two days ago, the word was swill, which I had no idea what that meant.

But overall, Srivastava says Wordle is more like a logic puzzle than a word game.

SRIVASTAVA: A lot of my friends who are really hooked on it actually aren't English majors, either. They're all engineering majors or pre meds who like the idea of putting puzzles together and trying to come come up with the combinations in your mind of what fits into each word and coming up with your new guesses.

Melinda Mahand says there’s also a deeper reason word games hold such an appeal. She references Genesis, God using words to create, and John chapter one—in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

MAHAND: So words are one of the ways that human beings are like the Father, and one of the ways we're able to imitate the Father. The human mind is created by God to solve problems, to figure out strategies, to achieve goals. And words and word puzzles are a very satisfying way to do that.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

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