‘It fooled me’: Twitter reacts to realising Wordle uses American spelling
One British Wordle player said they were ‘not impressed’
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Wordle, the daily free game where users have six tries to guess a five letter word, has taken the internet by storm this past week.
But British users have run into some trouble with the game today after realising Wordle uses American spelling.
Frustrated Wordle players have taken to Twitter to warn other users about the caveat, with one user tweeting their Wordle score with the caption: “Getting better at this. Also worth knowing this one is in American spelling. The rest of the English speaking world may get confused without that knowledge.”
The term “British English” has also been trending on the social media platform, with one user tweeting: “Damn! Wordle trying to trip me up. Can we have a function to select British English please?”
Another said: “In British English the game is actually spelled ‘Wourdle’.”
Other users pointed out that the creator of Wordle, software engineer Josh Wardle, is based in New York City which is why the word game would use American spelling.
Wardle created the game for his partner, Palak Shah and he made it public in October last year.
On 1 November 2021 the game had 90 daily users, by 2 January 2022 it had 300,000. Latest reports quote the figure to be closer to 2 million daily players.
Another user tweeted that Wordle “has done us dirty today” while an Australian user said: “Forget Novak Deltavic [sic] for five minutes, Australia has woken up to an American spelling in the latest Wordle and the entire country is currently folding in on itself.”
Many people were lamenting that it was the first time they had failed the word game as they weren’t aware it would be American English spelling.
One user commented: “Wordle 207 will go down in history as the one that pushed Britain and America the closest they’ve been to war since 1812.”
Another, who got the word quickly, said: “Two years ago I pulled my own child out of my body and placed him on my goddamn chest but I’ve never felt as powerful as when I got the Wordle on line 2.”
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments