Don’t be surprised if boxes of green, yellow and black or white emojis start to appear in your recent Twitter and Facebook feeds.
It’s the Internet’s new favorite game called Wordle. This daily dose of fun could give your mental health a boost and help build your English vocabulary, but it can be useful in other unexpected ways, too!
Probably a combination of “word” and “puzzle,” Wordle is a free word game that requires a player to guess a five-letter word in six tries. It gives clues as you try new words: It highlights letters green if they’re in the right position, yellow if they’re in the word but in the wrong position, and gray if they’re not in the featured word at all. I heard that there’s even a “hard mode” option for those who want an extra challenge.
Wordle can be addicting and has very quickly become as much a part of mornings of a growing number of people from housewives to office workers. Every day, my wife and daughter never fail to compare their daily scores. I always get startled when my wife suddenly pierces the peace and quiet and upsets my equanimity when she gets to the “gotcha” moment while playing the game.
My wife has converted a lot of her social media friends by just posting her daily Wordle achievements, making a few become curious about it and eventually taking it up too.
Playing it has become a friendly competition among its devotees and a source of bragging rights for those who can guess the word in just two or three tries. Players can’t wait to post their visual scorecards on social media, which show how players got to the correct answer and how many tries it took.
And now, at least one woman can credit Worldle with saving her mother’s life. When her 80-year-old mother living in Chicago failed to send her usual Wordle score, a California woman grew concerned. She tried to call her mother’s home and discovered it was disconnected. Worried that she had fallen or suffered a heart attack, she phoned the police. It’s a good thing she did. When the police arrived, they found her being held hostage by a man who intruded into her home and locked her up in the basement the night before.
This is a good reminder that it might be a good idea for seniors to develop a couple daily routines such as solving the day’s Wordle or anything that might tip off people close to you if something is amiss.
Wordle can save other things than life.
It can save our brains from atrophy. In 2019, researchers found that adults older than 50 who regularly enjoy word games perform better at tasks testing their memory, reasoning and attention skills. This research supports previous findings that indicate regular use of word and number puzzles helps keep our brains working better for longer.
Wordle might even save the average Filipino’s meager English vocabulary from complete atrophy too because it can be a language learning tool. It is also enabling non-English speaking people to practice their English vocabulary and spelling skills.
I wish we would have a Pilipino version too. A lot of young students hate Pilipino but if it is employed as a fun tool for vocabulary building, who knows?
While we are at it, Wordle can be used in history subjects too or even in literature.
And practically any subject that involves words or names. Teachers can create and devise their own digital interactive games based on the Wordle template to liven up not just reading and spelling lessons but even history (guess the name of heroes or places) biology (scientific names of flora and fauna), geography (capitals of countries) and so on. This type of interactive game can be an effective learning tool for young students because it involves high levels of engagement.
Some Math teachers have also demonstrated that Wordle could also be a powerful tool for teaching logic and other math concepts because, as they pointed out, Wordle tests not only word knowledge, but also logic games knowledge.
I must confess that I myself have not taken up Wordle yet because as a writer I grapple with words all the time.
What I am really happy about is that Wordle is now bringing back our interest in words.
I wish the creator of Wordle would feature more 6-letter words that are not commonplace and simplistic and have more significance, such as “nebula,” “obtund,” “ribald” and other curiosity-arousing words that will make you turn to a dictionary and find out more.
It’s only words you say but words can take people’s hearts away, as the song points out. Or in the words of an anonymous sage: a word can change someone’s entire day. Or the world.
The Mahabharata, the Bible, the teachings of Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius, the Koran, among other books, are nothing but words but they have served as the foundations of our respective cultures, beliefs, and ways of life. Through the ages, those ancient books have guided us, shaped and transformed us into what we are today.
Maybe sparked by the Wordle craze, words will matter once more and by exchanging words instead of mass exterminating arms with each other, words will save our world.