Monday's Wordle Answer Was Horribly Timed & The New York Times Actually Had To Change It
The word should've been "SORRY."
The Wordle App on a cellphone.
Wordle challenges players to guess a five-letter word once each day, and Monday's five-letter word just happened to blunder into the supercharged political fight around abortion in the United States.
The original solution for Monday's puzzle was "FETUS," and boy, did that set people off.
Critics took it to be a nod toward the leaked U.S. Supreme Court opinion that's poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, and they absolutely blasted Wordle's publisher, the New York Times.
That sent the Times into damage control. The paper quickly changed the daily puzzle answer so that "FETUS" wouldn't be involved anymore. Then it issued a statement saying it was a total fluke.
"This is entirely unintentional and a coincidence — today’s original answer was loaded into Wordle last year," the New York Times Games team wrote in a statement.
The Times bought Wordle in January, and it explained that the daily word list was compiled by its original programmers last year, not by the Times' team.
"Because of the current Wordle technology, it can be difficult to change words that have already been loaded into the game. When we discovered last week that this particular word would be featured today, we switched it for as many solvers as possible."
They also explained the complexity of going in and reprogramming a certain word, while stating that they tried to change it for everyone.
"At New York Times Games, we take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape," the paper said. "We want Wordle to remain distinct from the news."
A "vast majority" of people got the new word on Monday, Times spokesperson Jordan Cohen told the Associated Press.
And no, the new word wasn't "SORRY."