hello wordl

It's Wordle but you can play forever!

Play it here.

Introduction

Wordle is a word game similar to the TV show Lingo.

You get 6 tries to guess a 5-letter target word. After each guess, the letters light up in various colors as clues. Green means a letter is correct in this spot; yellow means a letter is elsewhere in the target word; gray means a letter is not in the target word at all.

Click About inside the game to learn by example.

History

In 2021, Josh "powerlanguage" Wardle created Wordle, a version of the Lingo word game that you can play once a day. The target word is the same for everyone each day, and you can share results to Twitter and compare with your friends. This made Wordle go absolutely viral around January 2022.

I liked this game a lot, but wanted to play more than once a day, so I created my own version of it, where the words are random but you can play as much as like. I called it hello wordl, which is a sort of bad programming joke.

But playing once a day is the point!

Don't get me wrong: I, too, think this is the most brilliant aspect of Wordle, and I don't aim to dethrone or improve on the "real" game.

My word contained two of the same letter!

This can happen in Wordle too, and I give clues exactly the same way Wordle does. I think the game would be too easy if I got rid of double letters, so I won't.

Where are the words coming from?

To generate target words, I have been manually curating the top 25,000 or so entries of Peter Norvig's English word frequency list to get rid of obscure words, plurals, conjugated verbs, inappropriate language, and British spellings (sorry). If you get dealt a strange target word, please open an issue on this here GitHub repository.

To check guesses, I use some variation of the Official Tournament and Club Word List used in North American Scrabble tournaments. (I'm not a native English speaker, but my English tends mostly American.)

For developers

You're very welcome to create your own Wordle offshoot/remix based on hello wordl. To get started, you can fork the code on GitHub.

To run the code locally, first install Node.js and npm. Then, in this directory, open a terminal and run npm install followed by npm run start. hello wordl will be running at http://localhost:3000/. Any changes you make to the source code will be reflected there. Have fun!

Finally, npm run deploy will deploy your code to the gh-pages branch of your fork, so that everyone can play your version at https://yourname.github.io/hello-wordl (or the name of your fork if you renamed it).