Released in Oct. 2021 but popularized in Jan. 2022, Wordle was a hit phenomenon, taking the world by storm and counting up over two million players by the end of January. Wordle is a web-based word game created and developed by Welsh software engineer Josh Wardle.
Players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match the correct position. Gray means the letter is not in the word, yellow means it’s in the word, but not in the correct order and green means it is in the word and in the correct place. However, like all trends, they come and they go, and that’s exactly what Wordle did.
“I used to play Wordle a lot,” sophomore Addy Tenbrink said. “And now I don’t play it at all, I actually haven’t thought about it in a long time. I forgot it existed.”
Many students, instead of playing Wordle, have found a new game developed by The New York Times, Connections. Connections is a 2023 word puzzle game where players must find four groupings of four words without making more than four mistakes.
“Wordle is still a very fun game and I’m glad that NYT didn’t change it to try and gain popularity again,” junior Cayman Barnes said. “it just kind of faded out and Connections seems to have faded in in the past few months from what I’ve seen”
Although some students think that it has faded away like every other trend including Tenbrink and Barnes, science teacher Kelly Barah disagrees. Barah states that he thinks Wordle is still relevant to this day.
“With a weird schedule and having a lot of students in my class, we kind of formed it as a bonding experience,” Barah said. “Everybody was looking forward to that for the day, But I don’t think it necessarily had its downfall.”
Although Wordle’s relevancy has slowly faded, many students and teachers continue to play, increasing their vocabulary and expanding their minds by playing tricky puzzles. Wordle and Connections are available to play on the web, or by downloading the ‘NYT Games’ app on the app store.
