Scrolling through your Twitter or Facebook feed you may have seen people post about gray yellow and green squares with a date on top. That game would be Wordle. 

Wordle is an online word web-based word game where players have six attempts to guess a five letter word. Wordle was released in October of 2021 and has become the most popular game of 2022. According to the New York Times in November of 2021, the game had 90 users and that number grew by 300,000 by the third week of November. Now, in February of 2022, the game has millions of users.

Wordle has become most popular in the upper midwest. The education site schoolauthority.org tracked over two million tweets in the last month, and has tracked them to Minnesota. After that Wisconsin came in as Number two and Iowa as Number four. Along with the Midwest, Millard West has participated in this internet craze.

“I kept seeing posts on Facebook of these strange grids of yellow, green, black squares and then I did a search to find what it was,” English teacher Michael Davis said. “I love crossword puzzles, so Wordle fell neatly into my jam. It becomes a morning thing I do when I check Facebook, someone else’s post usually reminds me to jump on and get it done.”

The reason many people have been continuing to play and spread the word about Wordle is because of the popularity of word games in the society we live in. Wordle has been very popular with the older generations but now has reached younger ages through other social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter.

“I first heard about Wordle from TikTok and from people in my classes at school,” senior Kaitlin Reynolds said. “To be honest at first I thought that it did not seem like that interesting of a game, but after I played it a few days in a row I was hooked. Now, I have to play every day in order to keep my streak alive.”

Wordle has become the perfect way to get people involved in strengthening brain activity and problem solving. It gives people the opportunity to challenge themselves in ways that they wouldn’t usually throughout their day. 

“I continue to play because it is a good way to wake up my mind in the morning, and while addictive, it requires an investment of only a few minutes every morning,” social studies teacher Dana Blakely. “ I like that it causes me to guess and eliminate, there is a bit of science to it, and I think that makes it challenging enough.”

This crazy little game gets people hooked in a variety of ways. It’s become a way for people to wake up in the morning and end their day by exercising their brain in a fun and interactive way.