For the second time in 2022, and not coincidentally second time since being bought by The New York Times, the internet word-game du jour Wordle will be undergoing a change.
With the news organization naming Tracy Bennett the official Wordle editor, the puzzle will now get its daily five-letter word of choice from a list curated by the New York Times.
The move marks a shift away from the preselected list of words that came along with the puzzle from its creator Josh Wardle, who sold the game to the Times for a sum in the “low seven figures.”
“Wordle’s gameplay will stay the same, and answers will be drawn from the same basic dictionary of answer words, with some editorial adjustments to ensure that the game stays focused on vocabulary that’s fun, accessible, lively and varied,” Everdeen Mason, the Times’ editorial director of games, said on Monday.
In addition, “while the answer list is curated, the much larger dictionary of English words that are valid guesses will not be curated. What solvers choose to use as guess words is their private choice,” Mason added.
And in a slight rule change, the solution for each day’s puzzle will never be a plural that ends in “s” or “es,” according to the Times, though players can still use those words as guesses if they so choose.
The puzzle has been a boon for the Times’s bottom line. In addition to the newspaper licensing a board game version this past summer, it has given a boost to digital subscriptions.
“Wordle brought an unprecedented tens of millions of new users to the Times, many of whom stayed to play other games which drove our best quarter ever for net subscriber additions to Games,” CEO Meredith Kopit Levien wrote in the earnings release from May.
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