If you are like me, you might be wondering, “What is Wordle?” and “Why is everybody at Western Branch obsessed with it?” 

According to The New York Times, Wordle is an online word-guessing game created by Josh Wardle with the purpose of having a game to share with his partner who loves word games.

Wordle was eventually shared to the public and currently over 2 million people are believed to play the game as reported by GoodtoKnow.

The word game took Western Branch by storm as it did with the rest of the world, and students of Western Branch High School cannot seem to stop talking about it. 

“I play almost every day,” Harsh Kapoor, 12, said. “People like to challenge their minds a lot. It doesn’t really challenge their minds as much as a test, it just challenges them a little bit.”

Wordle is a game that gives your six tries to guess the word of the day. The word has five letters and when you guess a correct letter, in the correct spot, it turns green. If you guess a correct letter in the wrong space, it is highlighted gray.

“I always start off with the word Peach and the second word I use is Storm. It gets me most of my letters every time.” said Abigail Straley, 12.

However, Straley expressed that she feels irritated with the game at times as well. 

“It’s actually not fun, it’s frustrating sometimes. Some of the letters repeat, so even though you have all of the letters, you don’t think you do but really you have all of them.” said Straley.

Not only are the students at Western Branch obsessed with the word game, but so are the faculty. Mrs. Hinton, AP Lit teacher, plays Wordle with her students every morning. 

“It is just fun interacting with my students and usually we end up laughing and congratulating each other when somebody gets it right.” said Mrs. Hinton.

There is also a sentimentality factor for Mrs. Hinton in the game.

“I have always loved doing word puzzles since I was a little girl, I used to do them with my grandmother.”

One student, Zach Warne, 12, uncovered a way of bypassing the coding of Wordle. 

“They have the words in the source code, so if you do ‘control U’ you can bring it up. You can scroll through the code and at the bottom there is this huge list of words and they go in order, so once you see the word for today, the word after will be the word for tomorrow.”

Another student, Graham Terry, 12, has his own thoughts and opinions on the matter.

“I don’t think cheating is unfair, but I don’t take it seriously enough to get mad if people do it. At the end of the day, it is a game for fun and people can play it however they want.” said Terry.