There are many words that Wordle players could think of to describe the recent migration of the popular word game to The New York Times; apparently, “fun” is not one of them. Wordle users have lost their Wordle winning streaks, experienced problems accessing the word game, and even complained of issues with the words themselves.
For those unfamiliar with Wordle, the word game gives users six tries to solve a five-letter word of the day. If the word you guess has a letter in common with the correct answer, and the letter is in the same location in both words, that letter turns green; if you guess a word that shares a common letter with the correct answer, but the letter is in a different place in the correct word than in your guess, it turns yellow; meanwhile the letters in your guess-words that are not found anywhere in the secret word turn gray.
Part of the fun is that every player in the world is trying to guess the same word, making it an inherent competition to see who can solve it with less guesses. To aid in this, the game has a built-in share feature that recreates users’ final board with color-coordinated square emojis, visually illustrating the steps they took to get to the correct answer (without giving it away to those who have not yet “done the Wordle” for that day). The emoji grids have become a staple on Twitter timelines.
After the word game exploded in popularity last month, Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, announced on January 31 via Twitter that he had sold it for an undisclosed seven-figure amount, and the game would be moving to a new home, The New York Times. He promised users would not lose their wins or streaks and that Wordle would remain free; he was partially correct.
Before The New York Times acquisition, the Wordle words were generally well-known terms.
Once Wordle migrated to The New York Times website, users say the game changed. They complained the words became hard, and many people lost their winning streaks.
One user was so upset he tweeted, “Good morning to everyone except all of the staff at The New York Times, their families, friends, pets, and acquaintances.”
Even though hundreds of tweets complained about more challenging vocabulary and obscure words, New York Times communications director Jordan Cohen said in an email to The Guardian, “Nothing has changed about the gameplay.”
Problems with the migration did not stop at seemingly more problematic words; users also faced various technological issues, including many, across multiple browsers, who got nothing but a blank white screen. According to dedicated Wordle players at The Verge, the people who could not access the Wordle were people who subscribe to The New York Times — apparently the word game did not like the cookies that the newspaper leaves behind in people’s browsers. Clearing out the cookies seemed to do the trick.
But on February 15, horror struck.
On Tuesday, users across the world were left confused when, after comparing answers with each other, they realized Wordle 241 had two different right answers.
Players took to Twitter to find out just what had happened. One user, ABC News’ Michael Slezak, tweeted The New York Times to find out how there could be two correct Wordle words.
It turns out, people who had not refreshed their browsers (like those who left Wordle open in a tab that they simply revisited each day instead of navigating to the site from scratch each time) had one word, while those who manually opened the URL anew had another. To make matters even more confusing, the words had five of six letters in common with each other.
Users still working off of the original URL, powerlanguage.co.uk, had the word AGORA, while users whose browsers populated The Times’ got the word AROMA.
The newspaper replied to Slezak with an explanation, which he shared with Twitter: “We are updating the word list over time to remove obscure words to keep the puzzle accessible to more people, as well as insensitive or offensive words… solvers of the old list can likely update to the new list by updating their browsers.”
Considering the primary definition for “agora” per Oxford Languages is a public space used for assemblies and markets in ancient Greece, perhaps it is fair to call that one obscure.
Updates to the word list may also be, in part, The New York Times’ solution to the hacking of Wordle during its migration, where 120 upcoming words leaked. A Twitter user alerted the paper to the hack, telling them to reset the data.
One thing is for sure, Wordle users are passionate about the game. Hopefully, The New York Times can keep them H-A-P-P-Y.
