A recent study by Wordtips, has placed the United States at an abysmally low ranking compared to otherWordleplayers around the world. According to theWordleranking, the US isn’t even among the top 10 of the list.
Ever since its release in October 2021, the word game has garnered a massive following all over the world.Wordleis so popular that"five letter words" became a Google Search trend, where many players have opted to look up hints to help with guessing theWordleof the day. Now owned by the New York Times, the game has even spawned variants, with niche interests ranging from math and geography toPokemon-themed word puzzles.
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A study conducted by Wordtips, a data compiler, places the US at 18th in global ranking with a score of 3.92. Within the US, North Dakota ranked the highest as a state with an averageWordlescore of 3.65. Meanwhile, Saint Paul, Minnesota was the top city with a 3.51 score, which isn’t surprising consideringMinnesota has the mostWordleactivityin the US so far. Incidentally, New York City was placed 26th out of the 116 US cities in the compiled data from Wordtips. On the global stage, Sweden earned the top spot with an average of 3.72 and Canberra, Australia emerged as the top city globally with a 3.58Wordlescore.
The virally popular word puzzle game continues to surge thanks to social media, and the game hadone of its most popular moments on Twitterin January. The data was compiled by pulling 195,248 tweets from January 2022 that used “#wordle” via the Twitter API. Out of these, game scores were taken from 142,669 tweets where each tweet presented the score as a fraction and grid of colored squares. Scores with contradicting fractions and colored squares were dropped, along with tweets that included “X/6” as a fraction. The data was then grouped by country, state, and city based on the user location data. According to Wordtips, “we saved only the countries with at least 50 tweets; in global cities and US cities rankings - with at least 25 tweets.”
The US ranking follows recent user complaints of the game’s seemingly increasing difficulty. This past Thursday, quite a few users complained that theWordleof the day, “BLOKE,” was “too British”. Users were alsonoticeably annoyed at February 16’sWordleanswer, where many believed it was not even a real word. Players' frustrations around certain words have been growing in the recent past, particularly following the NYT acquisition. Some accuseWordleof becoming pretentious since then, although this perceived pretentiousness is likely a product of confirmation bias. Regardless, the United States' low ranking is interesting.
