Student creates a Dutch version of the hit Wordle: ‘Made in one day’

Word Lingo is a simple word game. Every day there is one five letter English word to guess, and it’s the same word for everyone.

Each person gets six turns to guess the word; With each attempt you can find out which letters are in the correct place and which are not in the word. Once guessed, players can share their score on emoji cubes with friends or on social media.

Dutch version

The Dutch version was inevitable after the success of the original. This is what Alexander Klopping wrote Wednesday on Twitter, a after a day Jelle Besseling, a computer science student at Radboud University, put together a Dutch-language version.

he claims Word – How could it be otherwise – and works exactly the same way, but with five letter Dutch words. “After I read Alexander Klopping’s tweet, I worked until the evening, then almost finished it,” Woordle creator Besseling said. “The next morning I checked the words very carefully to make sure there was nothing crazy in them, and then I posted them.”

word list

The hardest part, according to Besseling, was finding a useful list of five-letter Dutch words. “Finally I downloaded the full 8GB Dutch word list from Wikipedia. There I filtered all the five letter words and sorted them by ‘most used.’ This is the puzzle word list now,” Besling says.

Cube Emoji created by players

The success of the original Wordle was swift. Wordle creator Josh Wardle didn’t release the game until October 2021, and by November 1, 90 people were playing. Two months later, that number had reached over 300,000 players, it reported New York times.

The game seems to have evolved through word of mouth on social media. Dot letters with colorful emoji blocks attract attention and make you curious. Maker Wardle didn’t come up with this emoji message itself, but in December saw its players manually share their scores via emoji blocks.

Wardle built the feature and created a share button, intentionally without a direct link to his game. The blocks themselves, according to Wardle, are more visually appealing and mysterious, and therefore will spark more interest. Besling has not yet been able to talk to Wardle about his Dutch version. “I think he’s very busy,” said the student.