Colm O'Regan: Wordle is not what a Dubliner calls the planet
Wordle. By now the word will have trickled through to you via some network, maybe messages with a load of green yellow and grey boxes on the family WhatsApp group. If you haven’t come across it, WORDLE is not what a Dubliner calls the planet. It’s a word game on the Internet. You must guess what today’s five-letter word is. You get six attempts -each of which has to be a real word- and then you must wait a day for the next one. It’s easy to get into and compelling. It makes you feel clever if you get it early, tense if you’ve only got one go left, cross when today’s word is FAVOR.
You could do it while watching your Tik Tok video ‘do numbers’, or while you’re standing next to a crush laden with bullocks, waiting for the vet to come.
It was created by a fella called Josh Wardle as a present for his puzzle-loving wife Palak. Which must create a bit of tension for the partners of Palek’s friends when they’re trying to choose gifts. Her friend gets a Worldwide Phenomenon made for her and they’re standing there like a tool with a voucher and a petrol station card.
It’s a nice thing because there’s only one a day. You have to do a thing that was known in the old days as ‘waiting’. There’s no money involved. There’s no league table. There’s no ulterior motive, as far as we know. Obviously, there is the chance that the world -or wordle as I can’t stop call it now– being what it is, we’ll find out all is not as it seems. That it’ll emerge the whole thing is a marketing ploy by the fossil fuel industry to get us to subconsciously support tar- sands but for now, I like to think wordle is as pure as it gets.
The internet is awash with tips and spoilers but my basic one is to always start with a word with four vowels. It cuts straight to the chase. It means that I’ll probably never get it first time. There are only 2000 words in the whole game and I’m fairly sure ADIEU isn’t one of them. And also D is not the commonest consonant in five-letter words. S probably is. But once you know the vowels then you’re on your way. Except you’re not. Well, I’m not. I freeze when confronted with bits of a word. It’s like my brain thinks ‘there are infinite possibilities. This is chaos!’ rather than ‘it’s probably a really common word. Just relax’. But what’s also fun is the words you find yourself saying out loud on a bus while trying to solve it. ZANOB, RAMPY, CLANG, ERPLE, SHANV, ZOINK, FFFOG, SUSAN. Can a be Susan a thing as well? Like a lazy Susan? No it’s not, but Wordle is gentle and rejects not-words. It won’t allow you waste one of your six attempts on SASIT.
It has given me a new appreciation for five-letter words. I start noticing them everywhere now. I realise that words I thought had five letters had more. CHANGE has six. It always five-ish to me. STRETCH has seven letters! How did that happen? Forget four-letter words. Five letter ones are where it’s at. (And four-letter plurals.) Their simple descriptive power. Their pleasing pattern on the page makes for clarity in writing. I might start using these words often, which means other words alter their focus. Relax! These shall occur slyly.
Anyway google it and find the website and see what you think. The wordle’s your oyster. No wait, that’s 6 letters. O something T. What the eff is it? Oh, it’s OATHS!
