You’ve probably seen your friends on social media talking about Wordle and wondered … what the heck is this thing that everyone is suddenly obsessed with? Fear not! We’re here to end your FOMO (until the next inscrutable internet trend, that is): Wordle is the latest word game to take over the internet.

It’s also incredibly wholesome, considering it was originally created by software engineer Josh Wardle as a game to play together with his word game-loving partner, Palak Shah, as they passed the time during the pandemic. Luckily for the rest of us, after the game caught on with his family and friends, Wardle decided to share it with the rest of the world, and its popularity has exploded in the months since its October 2021 release.

How do you play Wordle?

Opening up the Wordle site once per day, you get six tries to guess that day’s mystery five-letter word, with each attempt giving you feedback on which individual letters from your guess were correct, sort of like Wheel of Fortune or the weirdly morbid game it was derived from, combined with a bit of Mastermind. The letters in the words you guess will light up green if the letter is in the right place, yellow if it is in the word but in a different place, and gray if it is not in the secret word at all. That’s all the guidance you’ll get for figuring out what word everyone is trying to guess.

So, you’d better have a good first word to try to help you figure out what letters are in the mystery word! The game is technically a one-player thing, but you can compete with your friends (since everyone is trying to guess the same word each day) and see who figures it out quicker, which is why so many people have flocked to the game online. It’s also the source of upset for those who don’t know what Wordle is and are feeling left out because they’re too afraid to ask.

It’s simply a fun word game that everyone is playing with each other and competing over with their friends!

Can you play Wordle more than once per day?

The official version of Wordle only allows you to play once per day, but as its popularity has grown, so has the desire for the ability to play more frequently. So, people have taken matters into their own hands, with variations emerging like this one by engineer Katherine Peterson, which lets you keep playing as many times as you want.

My brother’s been playing Wordle every day, and he asked me to build him a version that he could play more than once a day.

If anyone else wants to play:https://t.co/5bLn8kaIr7

— Katherine Peterson (@katherinecodes) December 29, 2021

The official version of the game will keep track of your progress every day—meaning, no, you can’t get away with not figuring out a word because the computer always knows. That’s part of what makes it so addicting. Right now, Wordle is using a range of random words from “tiger” yesterday to ***** today (What? I’m not giving you the answer!), so there isn’t really a way for you to figure out what the word is unless you cheat.

So, try your hand at Wordle and get addicted to figuring out what it could possibly be, just like the rest of Twitter.

(image: NBC)

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