In the Beginning There's Wordle

Wondering why green-, grey- and yellow-tiled boxes have replaced all the 'Feel-Cute-May-Delete-Later' selfies on your social media timelines? Blame it on Wordle, which is the new Reels - you know, pants with a word on the butt and one of the letters is hidden between the buttocks - which was the new Dalgona. The latest pandemic obsession - whose fandom has ballooned from 90 daily players in November to 2   million in mid-January - is a simple yet highly addictive online word game, that lacks the hoity-toityness of a crossword or the pugnaciousness of Scrabble. Instead, it has compelled the polarised populace to unite for a larger common purpose - figuring out the five-letter word of the day.

With zero clues and only the colours green, yellow and grey to guide you, the trial-and-error-ish game requires skill and logic (and, of course, for god to be on your side that day) to solve. One of its USPs is that software engineer Josh Wardle, who created (the sorta namesake) Wordle, for his word game-loving wife, swears he is not in it for the money and doesn't want to do 'anything shady with your data or eyeballs'. He also believes in only offering one puzzle a day, which heightens the game's appeal, and, finally, offers a three-minute antidote to lockdown fatigue that doesn't involve knitting sweaters, or baking entire loaves from scratch.