The viral word game Wordle has been bought by the New York Times Company for a sum the publisher says “in the low seven figures”.
NYT bought Wordle from its creator, Josh Wardle, a New York software engineer who made it as a gift for his girlfriend.
The Times, which paywalls its crossword, said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players - "initially" being the operative word.
Wordle was created as a no-charge, ad-free website in October, and had 90 users on November 1. That grew to 300,000 by the middle of that month, and now more than three million play the game daily - taking up to six goes to guess a five-letter word.
Buzzfeed credited a clutch of Kiwis for helping turn the word game into a viral phenomenon on social media, including Auckland man Paul Brislen, Andrew Chen (best known as a Covid commentator and venture capitalist) and a government adviser known only by her Twitter handle, Elizabeth S, who hit on the mechanism - soon officially adopted by Wardle - of using coloured squares to share a result without revealing the letters.
