For many, opening up Wordle—that five-letter, six-try guessing game acquired by The New York Times in January and responsible for bringing in “an unprecedented tens of millions” of new subscribers” to the company—is a daily ritual to escape from the burnout of pandemic life. But on Monday, when some players discovered that the randomly-selected answer for the day was “fetus,” it would seem anything but, given last week's news that the Supreme Court is poised to strike down Roe v. Wade.
By 12:01 AM, the Gray Lady had published an editor's note—headlined “A Note About Today’s Wordle Game”—accounting for the mishap. “This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence—today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year,” Everdeen Mason, the Times’ Editorial Director of Games, wrote. “We take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape,” she assured solvers, “and want Wordle to remain distinct from the news.”
That today “some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event” is, according to the Times, a particularly unfortunate example of the technical difficulties the Times' Games department has discovered. The editor’s note went on to explain that when Games realized last week that Monday’s featured word would be “fetus,” they “switched it for as many solvers as possible.” But “because of the current Wordle technology, it can be difficult to change words that have already been loaded into the game,” Mason wrote, and users who did not refresh their browser window were still asked to solve the original puzzle. That explanation presented its own tech-related questions for Canadian journalist Doug Saunders, who, as one does, turned to Twitter-inclined software developers:
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Monday was not the first time the Times has altered the game since acquiring it in January. In February, The Verge reported that the Times had removed words, such as “slave,” “lynch,” and “wench,” from guesses and solutions. “We are updating the world list over time to remove obscure words to keep the puzzle accessible to more people, as well as insensitive or offensive words,” the Times told one reader.
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