Wordle Just Made a Big Change

Wordle just tossed longtime players a curveball: the answer list is no longer strictly made of fresh words. In an email to subscribers of its Gameplay newsletter, the New York Times said that starting Monday, Feb. 2, it will begin recycling past solutions in the daily puzzle. "Starting on Monday, we will begin adding previously run words back into play," the company wrote.

The Times stressed that not every answer will be a repeat. The game still has "many first-time answers to debut," the statement said, adding that the change could create more of those "serendipitous moments" when the word of the day lines up with players' lives. Reopening the vault of old answers dramatically expands the pool of possible solutions, which could alter the habits of daily players who track patterns or rule out past answers by default, Mashable reports.

Wordle creator Josh Wardle, who sold the game to the Times in 2022, predicted the move last year, Forbes reports. He said there are around 13,000 five-letter words in the English language but the game has around 2,500. "Maybe even the concept of the list has gone away, right?" he told the Elis James and John Robins podcast on the BBC. "They have an editor now, who picks the Wordle in advance. So maybe that list that was baked in when I made the game … who knows?" he said. "There could be a repeat before they reach the end of the word list."