Mind Gaming
Peak and spell
Solve word puzzles and save your brain
Last autumn, Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle created a game for his girlfriend. The couple had been enjoying The New York Times’ spelling games and crosswords during lockdown, so he chose to make a web-based word puzzle. The idea was simple: guess a daily five-letter word in six attempts. Correctly identified letters were highlighted by green (right letter, right location) yellow (right letter, wrong location) tiles. The name Wardle gave his game was a twist on his own: Wordle.
The rest you know. Within three months of its release in October last year, Wordle had more than two million daily players, its iconic blocks filling social feeds as users shared their (spoiler-free) results. “Wordle got us thinking about linguistics – it’s brilliant,” says Dr Gareth Carrol, an author and senior lecturer in psycholinguistics at the University of Birmingham. “Language’s change is hugely driven by culture and technology.”
Indeed it is. After The New York Times (NYT) bought the game from Wardle in January (for an undisclosed seven-figure sum) it also launched WordleBot, a companion tool that rates your performance and advises how you could have played better.
But if you’re looking for a more organic approach to improving your wordplay, the eminently human Dr Carrol is on hand. And with Wordle now a fully analogue board game, too, it’s time to tune up our most organic word computer: the human brain.
Gareth Carrol, linguistics expert
© Ashley Maile
Language's change is hugely driven by culture and technology
Start strong
According to WordleBot’s calculation of probable subsequent guesses – the tool considers only 4,500 words as potential Wordle solutions – the opener most likely to result in success is SLATE. However, Dr Carrol prefers PLANE, STRIM or DOUGH. “Those cover all the vowels and a good number of consonants without repetition,” he explains.
Combo up
The most common consonants in the English language are R, T, N, S, L and C, but Carrol says to think in pairs, like ST, CL, SK or TW. “Think what consonant sounds naturally go together, and which vowels occur with each other. Their placement is largely to do with how we make sounds.” And don’t overlook double consonants – LL is the most common.
Be social
When NYT took over Wordle, it caused outrage by removing answers such as SLAVE, LYNCH and WENCH. The backlash wasn’t about censorship, but because it created two versions with different daily answers (Wordle is basically a webpage, and some users were playing the older version saved to their desktop). For Carrol, it’s all part of the ongoing relationship of vocabulary and culture: “Language’s evolution is a map of our social history. It’s constantly evolving.”
Be social
At the age of eight, the average child learns around 6-7 words a day. An adult English speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000 words, with a passive vocabulary double that. “Language is the sum total of everything you’ve ever heard and experienced,” says Carrol. “But by middle age it’s fairly fixed.” That’s where games like Wordle come in. A 2014 study by the University of Santiago de Compostela of 326 people over the age of 50 observed that those with a higher vocabulary could better tap into their ‘cognitive reserve’ – the brain’s capacity to compensate for impairment. “There’s nothing in our lives that’s not affected by the words we use,” says Carrol.
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