Canada edges out the U.S. when it comes to solving Wordle, new study finds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/03/2022 (927 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Add another Toronto win to the list, and no, we’re not talking about the Raptors or the Leafs.

Compared to the rest of the country, Toronto is ranked the best at Wordle, the online word puzzle that’s taken the internet by storm, a new study shows.

Using data on Twitter, WordTips analyzed the countries and cities with the best Wordle scores in the world, with the data showing Toronto is the Canadian city with the best average Wordle score of 3.81 guesses, surpassing Vancouver by a mere 0.03 guesses.

While Toronto is the highest-ranking city in the country for Wordle scores, it lands 25th on the world stage according to city, with Canberra, Australia ranking first at 3.58 guesses per puzzle on average.

In terms of countries, Canada ranks 17th in the world, beating the United States which sits at the 18th spot. Sweden is ranked the best in the world with an average of 3.71 guesses per puzzle.

Wordle has become a fixture in the lives of millions almost overnight. The word game, created by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, was fairly obscure when it was launched in October. Now, it’s one of the most popular games of the day, and was recently bought by the New York Times for a sum “in the low seven figures.”

The game is simple: all players have to guess the same five-letter word in six attempts. After each guess, the tiles turn grey to show which letters are not in the word, yellow for which letters are in the word but in the wrong position, and green for which letters are in the correct space. Players have one day to solve the puzzle before the game resets with a new word.

For months now, players have been sharing their Wordle results and thoughts on Twitter and other social media platforms.

WordTips, a word search tool that helps word-gamers – think Scrabble – find words from specific letters, used 142,669 of those score-sharing tweets to conduct their research into which cities and countries outperform others in the daily Wordle.

According to their research, the average number of guesses players need to solve the puzzle is 3.919.

Alessia Passafiume is a GTA-based staff reporter for the Star. Reach Alessia via email: apassafiume@torstar.ca