‘It fooled me’: Twitter reacts to realising Wordle uses American spelling

One British Wordle player said they were ‘not impressed’

A game of Wordle (Wordle)

Wordle, the daily free game where users have six tries to guess a five letter word, has taken the internet by storm this past week.

But British users have run into some trouble with the game today after realising Wordle uses American spelling.

Frustrated Wordle players have taken to Twitter to warn other users about the caveat, with one user tweeting their Wordle score with the caption: “Getting better at this. Also worth knowing this one is in American spelling. The rest of the English speaking world may get confused without that knowledge.”

The term “British English” has also been trending on the social media platform, with one user tweeting: “​​Damn! Wordle trying to trip me up. Can we have a function to select British English please?”

Another said: “In British English the game is actually spelled ‘Wourdle’.”

Other users pointed out that the creator of Wordle, software engineer Josh Wardle, is based in New York City which is why the word game would use American spelling.

Wardle created the game for his partner, Palak Shah and he made it public in October last year.

On 1 November 2021 the game had 90 daily users, by 2 January 2022 it had 300,000. Latest reports quote the figure to be closer to 2 million daily players.

Another user tweeted that Wordle “has done us dirty today” while an Australian user said: “Forget Novak Deltavic [sic] for five minutes, Australia has woken up to an American spelling in the latest Wordle and the entire country is currently folding in on itself.”

Many people were lamenting that it was the first time they had failed the word game as they weren’t aware it would be American English spelling.

One user commented: “Wordle 207 will go down in history as the one that pushed Britain and America the closest they’ve been to war since 1812.”

Another, who got the word quickly, said: “Two years ago I pulled my own child out of my body and placed him on my goddamn chest but I’ve never felt as powerful as when I got the Wordle on line 2.”