Wordle Creator: Twilio Salutes You With An SMS-Based Tribute

Wordle Creator: Twilio Salutes You With An SMS-Based Tribute

Like many word nerds and puzzle lovers, I've recently become obsessed with Wordle, a word puzzle game created by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle for his word game-loving partner.

New Yorker comic by Zoe Si

Here's the premise: each day, users have five guesses to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, tiles may change color to reflect how close your guess was to the day's goal word. A green box means the letter was correct and in the right spot, a yellow box means the letter is correct but is located in a different spot, and a gray box means the letter is not in the goal word at all.

The game has exploded on social media, filling my feeds with the signature green and yellow boxes in brag tweets, memes, and cartoons from the New Yorker.

Absolutely infatuated with Josh Wardle’s brilliant web-based game, we’ve built a just-for-fun homage to Wordle that you can play over SMS. Completed your web Wordle for the day? Now you can keep scratching that word game itch all day long, over text message: simply text a 5-letter word or "?" to +12155156567 to start playing over SMS or over WhatsApp here!

After the first message, you are told you can text a "?" to receive directions on how to play and also to learn more about Josh. 

After five guesses, you can start over and try to guess a new random word from a file containing over 2500 five-letter words from the English dictionary!

Twilio celebrates builders, and celebrates how Josh was just tinkering with the app in the first place to build something for his partner. Josh, we salute you!

Questions on the build? Feel free to leave comments and issues on the Twordle GitHub repo or dig into my Dev.to How-To, find me on Twitter, or email me!

Questions about Wordle? Find Josh Wardle on Twitter and check out Wordle each day for a new word puzzle!

Questions about Twilio? Sign up for an account to build your own Twordle, or talk to Sales about Twilio SMS or Serverless solutions.