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Wordle and Worldle · 15 October 2022


If you have not tried Wordle and Worldle yet, you should. They help you keep your mind active.


I like puzzles. All kinds of puzzles. Rubik’s cubes, jigsaw puzzles, Jumble. Just about any kind of puzzle. Which is why I like Wordle and Worldle. They are puzzles on the internet.


To be sure, if I could only do one puzzle to do on the internet, it would be Wordle.


Wordle is a word guessing game. All the words are five letters, you have six guesses, and the answers are never plurals. At least not plurals that end with the letter S. There are other rules, but these three are the most important.


When playing the game, each letter that is in the word but not in the correct place turns yellow. Each letter that is in the correct place turns green.


Wordle is really the old Mastermind game using words instead of colored pegs. Instead of 10,000 combinations, there are over 2,000 possible words, but there are over 10,000 other words that are accepted as guesses (at least according to towarddatascience.com). Wordle is rather ingenious and somewhat addicting.


I sometimes take too long trying to figure out the solution for the day. No. I am not one of those people who needs to come up with the best strategy to find the word in only three guesses or anything like that. In fact, I have an option set to make sure that if I guess a letter that is in the solution, I must use it in all subsequent guesses. Supposedly, that is a more difficult way to play, but it was the way I was playing when I started playing anyway, so I just flipped the switch and the game makes me play that way.


At any rate, I do like to play the game (even though the ad on top of the site when I play on my iPad is quite annoying). And I play it before I get to work lest anybody tip me off to the word of the day.


Worldle is another game I play on the internet.



In reality, I should really hate Worldle. After all, geography is my worst subject ever. I could not tell you that Burkina Faso was a country let alone where it was. At least not before I started playing Worldle. Now, I can at least get in the general vicinity of several African and European and Asian and South American and even North American countries. (By the way, did you know that Central America is really just part of North America? I think I knew that before, but I keep coming back to it like it was new to me.) Oh. And if you did not know, Burkina Faso is one of the many countries on the continent of Africa.


Regardless of my geographic prowess (rather, lack thereof), I enjoy Worldle. In fact, I am actually learning from doing the game. I can now tell you that there are more tiny islands in the world than I ever thought possible. I can tell you that there are several nations that are landlocked in other nations. And I can tell you that geography is still my worst subject ever.


I could probably talk about puzzles for a lot longer, but I will just leave you with one last thought. Keep your mind active. After all, the mind is like a muscle. You need to keep using it to keep it strong. And as the old ad used to say, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” So whether you ever try Wordle or Worldle, keep using your mind. Keep thinking.

© 2022 Michael T. Miyoshi

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