Wordle has nearly 3 million players across the world and versions of it are appearing in other languages.
The game, in which players guess a five letter word through linguistic inferences, became an unlikely success, suggesting a change in how we communicate – both in terms of how we socialize, and in our relationship with language.
Players are able to narrow down possibilities by calculating the probability of different letter combinations. If your first guess produced, say, two letters both yellow, you can make an educated guess about the most likely positions for those letters in English words. The difficulty of each puzzle depends on the relationship between the solution and the player’s first guess.
You can see this reliance on conventions develop over the history of written English. In early medieval manuscripts, often intended for only a few readers, there aren’t many rules. No standardized dialect or spelling, no one even cares if you split a word in two. You don’t need standardized rules because the specialized audience understands.