Wordle players have expressed their frustrations this morning after learning that today’s five-letter word contains another double letter.
The daily game, which has soared in popularity in recent months, gives users six tries to guess a five-letter word.
Wordle was originally created by New York City-based software engineer Josh Wardle as a present for his partner, and was acquired by The New York Times (NYT) for an undisclosed seven-figure sum at the beginning of this month.
The rules of Wordle are simple. As players make their guesses, the letter tiles will turn a different colour depending on whether they appear in the word. If a letter is not in the word, it turns grey.
If it is in the word but in the wrong position, it turns yellow. If it’s in the word in the correct position, it turns green. But the game does not tell you when a letter you guessed correctly appears in the game twice.
*Warning: Spoilers ahead*
Many social media users have taken to Twitter to complain about today’s word containing a double letter after Wordle 251 (yesterday’s word) contained not one, but two sets of double letters.
The answer for Wordle 252 is “spill”, which contains two “l”s.
“These double letter words are killing me,” one person said. “Enough of the double letters,” another said.
“Wordle ruining my day again,” said one person who failed to guess the word correctly.
Some people believe double letter words have been appearing more frequently in the game since it was acquired by NYT and have accused the publication of adding them.
“I need NYT to stop with the double letters,” one person tweeted.
Another wrote: “Once again NYT up to its dirty tricks. Starting to expect double letters and multiple word choices when one letter missing as the norm. Yesterday’s double double letters were ridiculous.”
Rumours that NYT has made Wordle harder since its acquisition were dispelled by one expert earlier this week.
David Andersen, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, US, compared the source code of the original game with the NYT version and found that only six words have been changed.
In a thread posted to Twitter on Sunday 20 February, Andersen said the NYT had changed the original word list in “very small ways” and had removed just six words – fibre, lynch, agora, pupal, slave and wench – likely because they may have caused offence.
