A Note About Today’s Wordle Game

In case there's a paywall for the editor's note: the tl;dr is that today's word was originally supposed to be "FETUS". Last week the NYT noticed this and made a change, but this change wouldn't propagate to all the Wordle players who still have the cached word list in their browsers.

Full text below:

It’s been just over three months since The New York Times acquired Wordle, the hugely popular puzzle created by Josh Wardle. Wordle continues to delight millions of people every day, but as we move it over to The Times’s technology, we have continued to discover challenges.

Today, for example, some users may see an outdated answer that seems closely connected to a major recent news event.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.

At New York Times Games, we take our role seriously as a place to entertain and escape, and we want Wordle to remain distinct from the news.

But 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.

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 But we know that some people won’t do that and, as a result, will be asked to solve the outdated puzzle.

We want to emphasize that this is a very unusual circumstance. When we acquired Wordle in January, it had been built for a relatively small group of users. We’re now busy revamping Wordle’s technology so that everyone always receives the same word. We are committed to ensuring that tens of millions of people have a gratifying and consistent experience, every day.

Thank you for your patience while we work on making improvements to Wordle. We wouldn’t be here without our amazing community of solvers.

Sooo, “fetus” is a word dangerous enough that it requires a 350 word explainer article to accompany it?

Sometimes it's just not a good time for "fetus" and removing it is the easiest solution.

It's not dangerous, it's just bad timing. It makes it look like NYT "chose" that word because of the recent ruling and is making a political statement, even though it's totally random.

I am surprised that they are not stating the word explicitly, only vaguely as "closely connected to a major recent news event" ("He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" comes to mind as an association)

Edit: the wording was updated to be more constructive