You might not have come across Wordle. It is possible that if you aren’t on social media and don’t know anyone with a compelling need to prove how clever they are on a daily basis, you might never have seen the mysterious grid of grey, green and yellow squares indicating how quickly someone else guessed a five-letter word.
But in two years' time, when Netflix airs its 90-minute cultural retrospective about the craze surrounding this humble internet word game, you, the discerning FT reader, might enjoy this piece. The rest of us can gather around and warm ourselves at the bonfire of the nation’s redundant Scrabble boards as we consider whether Wordle can endure beyond its splashy debut.
In a pandemic, time is molasses, so perhaps it is meaningless that, as recently as November, the browser-based interface had just 90 daily players. By last week, it was reportedly reaching more than 2m a day, an R rate to rival a new variant.