I don't think "wordle" was a popular name for the game before it got popular on the internet, so a trademark makes sense in this case.

Of course Wordle is just Lingo but online. And Lingo is just televised Mastermind with letters instead of colours. Mastermind is an extension of Bulls and Cows and if you go back further I'm sure you can find another game like it.

There are some very big broadcasting companies that have put a lot of money into the "guess the word" genre and the New York Times probably know that they can't take down every game with similar rules.

The best they can do is find infringement of their trademark and pursue those who infringe upon it, or risk losing the trademark all together. They could also license the trademark, of course, but a blanket cease and desist letter is cheaper than negotiating a contract.

Been wondering about the trademark, there are a lot of variants with names also ending in -le (eg Nerdle, Semantle), would they be in any danger of getting a cease and desist? Asking for a friend ;)

I'm asking about the name because you can't patent gameplay afaik, so even if it was a straight clone, as long as the word list (and code?) was original it would be OK.

On the other hand I recall Worlds.com suing (somewhat successfully?) both Second Life and Minecraft, so maybe you can patent game concepts?

> the New York Times probably know that they can't take down every game with similar rules.

I might be wrong as I'm not a lawyer, but I was under the impression that game rules are not protected by copyright.

WB games did patent a game rules system (Nemesis), but copyright is not the same as patents, and also I'm not sure how they got away with doing it.

I can't tell because it has been taken down—was the Wordle archive using the original game's javascript code, or was it a complete rewrite? Wordle is entirely client-side, so it would have been easy to do.

The game concept (probably) isn't copyrightable, but the code certainly is.

The word list is absolutely copyrightable however.

That's not actually obvious to me—is it a creative work? I doubt Patrick Wardle manually wrote out every word in the array.

The word list of acceptable answers isn't, that's just essentially all 5 letter words. The actual answer list is a manually curated list of words (cut down from 10-15k to 2-3k), chosen to be good fun to play with.

I'd love to see where the wordle game existed before the guy who made it, made it? Got any links?

There's a TV show in the UK at least called Lingo that predates it by several years. It's literally the exact same game.

But full credit to Wordle's creator, the one word a day and social media sharing stuff is the real secret sauce.

Also Motus on French television.

But it doesn't matter, you can't protect a game concept with intellectual property. Neither patents nor copyright allow this. The only thing that could be protected here is the name Wordle, the art assets (if there are any that are nongeneric enough), and the exact source code.

See Tetris, etc.

That's Lingo, not Wordle.

Secondly, everyone keeps mentioning (repeating?...) about this famous TV show in the UK; I have never heard of it until december. Reading the gameplay of the show on Wikipedia.... it sounds like an almost entirely different game, aside from the fact it (sometimes!) involves a 5 letter word, and you have to pick letters. Mastermind (the game), is so much closer

Did you actually see the tv show?

This American Lingo TV game looks very similar. I think Wordle's hard mode is the same.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sC0kie6dPjo

Well it's daytime TV quiz show, so no reason you would have heard of it. The first rounds are the same as wordle. See for yourself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O5O7ZCvpItY

Yes I've watched it, yes it is the exact same game with the exact same rules. (Across 4, 5 and 6 letter words).

“Wordle” is a trademark that NYT owns

Apparently a few entities own it:

https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=toc&state=4805%3A...

Unless those people could prove they independently created their Wordles before Wardle’s Wordle was created, it doesn’t legally matter. NYT owns the rights to “Wordle” over the similar clones.

I don’t think “Wordle” is a registered trademark.