Blog

• From the 1913 crossword to Wordle: a short history of the daily puzzle The crossword, sudoku and Wordle each arrived when people needed a small, contained thing to do. How the once-a-day puzzle went from newspaper filler to a habit billions of people share.
• What dle games are, and why people keep coming back to them Where the -dle games came from, what makes one a dle, and what a psychologist and our own play data say about why a two-minute puzzle turns into a daily habit.
• What half a billion Wordles, and our own first week, say about how people play People open with the word they like, not the word that works. They play at lunch. And some puzzles quietly break streaks. What the data from The New York Times and from Bingedle's first 7,400 rounds have in common.