Trends come in, take the entire world by storm and then slowly fade out of the limelight. At least that’s how it worked before Wordle. This one looks to stay.

Wordle, an online game recently purchased by the New York Times, allows players six attempts at guessing a daily five-letter word. Wordle was released to the public in October 2021, in November 2021 the game only had about 90 players and as of February 2022, the game has over 2 million daily players. 

Wordle was created by 36-year old Josh Wardle, who created the first prototype of the game back in 2013. Wardle, who is originally from the United Kingdom, first created the game for his American wife Palak Shah. Wardle sold Wordle to the New York Times in January of 2022 for over $1 million; the exact number has not been released to the public.

Wordle has one puzzle every 24 hours for players to try and solve, many people see it as a nice way to start their day or as a brain break in the middle of a long workday.

“It’s fun. It’s, like, kind of like what I do in the morning when I don’t feel like getting out of bed yet,” said sophomore Chelsea Trieu.

Wordle challenges those of all ages, including Oak Park’s students as well as their teachers.

“Well, you know I’m kind of a word nerd, being an English teacher and all,” said English teacher Ann Elder. “I just like to play with words, and I like to learn new words, too. That’s a big deal trying to increase my vocabulary all the time.” 

With every viral game comes all of the different versions of the original. There’s well over 100 different versions of Wordle out there in the depths of the internet, and they don’t go unplayed. 

“I also do Worldle, the one with the countries,” said librarian Angela Van Batavia.

Wordle started as only a single-player, single-time game, meaning you can only play one time on a specific device every day, but that doesn’t stop people from being competitive.

“Well, we [business teacher Joel Pabon] do it together, but it’s kind of like we do it with each other in the room and then we tell each other how we did,” said social studies teacher Megan Pabon.