Wordle’s Multiverse Of Madness Confuses Players With Different Daily Words

It began Monday.

The New York Times, worried that Wordle players are inherently more sensitive and easily triggered than your average bear, removed the word ‘fetus’ from the answer list. But due to the technology behind Wordle, not every player’s word was replaced, leading to two different correct answers Monday.

Spoilers ahead.

As the paper of record notes, “some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event. This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence — today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year.”

Notably absent from the explainer piece is the actual word, fetus, though there is nothing inherently wrong or dangerous about reading it or having it included in a word puzzle game. Of course, the word was taken out due to the extremely divisive news surrounding the Supreme Court’s possible decision to overturn Roe v Wade.

Clearly the subject of abortion is incredibly volatile and I could almost understand the New York Times removing a word like ‘abort’ from the answer list, though it can mean things other than the termination of a pregnancy (like “Abort mission!”)

Likewise, a fetus in and of itself, isn’t exactly controversial. They’ve probably drawn more attention to the word than they would have if they’d just left well enough alone. And it’s not like they haven’t covered the abortion issue. By all means, let’s keep this type of game free from politics, but the word ‘fetus’ isn’t exactly political.

Tuesday led to more confusion. Removing ‘fetus’ and replacing it with ‘shine’ had a ripple effect on the following day’s Wordle. While the correct answer is ‘gecko’ a lot of players got ‘butch’ instead.

Wordle’s Very Own Multiverse Of Madness

We’ll call the Wordle with the correct answers Wordle-616 and the Wordle with the incorrect/outdated answers Wordle-838. (For those of you who don’t understand this, I’m making a Doctor Strange joke).

If you want to play the game that everyone else is playing and not the outdated Wordle-838, there’s a simple fix: All you need to do is clear your browser cache or refresh the window to get things back on track.

“You won’t receive the outdated version if you have refreshed your browser window. But we know that some people won’t do that and, as a result, will be asked to solve the outdated puzzle,” writes the Times. A simple fix, indeed!

“We’re now busy revamping Wordle’s technology so that everyone always receives the same word,” the paper adds.

We’ll see if people experience two different words tomorrow. I admit, I’m always a bit skeptical of big changes to things that mostly work quite well, but we’ll just have to wait and see on this one.

Read my Doctor Strange 2 review right here.