Here’s an explainer on Wordle from someone who just learned what it was

Over the past few weeks, you might have seen people you follow on Twitter randomly posting about something called “Wordle.” The game has apparently blown up over the holidays, but if you’re like me, you also might not have had any idea of what it was.

With that in mind, let’s stumble our way through it together. To put it simply, Wordle is a free word-based puzzle game that you can play in your browser for free — no download required. That certainly makes it easier to access, although actually playing it can likely be somewhat challenging.

Basically, Wordle gives players six chances to guess a random five-letter word. Letters will be highlighted in three different colours to denote the following:

• Green — the correct letter in the correct spot
• Yellow — a correct letter in the wrong spot
• Grey — a letter that doesn’t show up anywhere in the word

One of the unique elements about Wordle is that it’s the same puzzle for everyone each day. This adds a social element to it, as people can discuss how they got on with the daily puzzle. To that point, you can even share a solution-free summary of your results to show how you fared.

It’ll show up like so:

Who else is playing #Wordle? Addicted. pic.twitter.com/HJ7pt7WLmn

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) January 4, 2022

Notably, U.K. Redditor Josh Wardle told The New York Times that he originally created the game for his partner before making it available online for everyone. He also says he’s already queued up the game with around 2,500 words, so it’ll be good to go for quite some time. Despite that, he promises that he has no intentions of monetizing the game.