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When Tracy Bennett sits down to play Wordle, she does so with a word of six — not five — letters in mind: Whimsy. She wants to approach the game with a bit of levity. So, she opens The New York Times Games app and taps into her intuition, five empty squares — each a chance for success — staring back at her.
“I’m going to do — ” she says, pausing to adjust her red glasses, “‘flare.’” It’s what feels right to her this afternoon.
“I got one green letter and four gray letters,” she adds, referring to the game’s color-coded squares that signify which guessed letters are correct. (For the somehow uninitiated: Green indicates that a letter was placed correctly; yellow means a correct letter was guessed, but not in the correct space; and gray means the letter does not appear in the word.)
Some may find the exercise meritless — Ms. Bennett does, after all, already know the answer. As Wordle’s first and only editor, she knows every answer to every Wordle puzzle about six weeks in advance. But she still plays the game every day to get a real-time feel for the experience. (She also admits that, sometimes, she forgets her solution selection. On Thursday, for example, she got the answer on her sixth try.)
When The Times announced in November 2022 that Ms. Bennett would be the newspaper’s first editor of Wordle, the popular online game The Times had acquired in January 2022, the word game-playing world, which felt like the entire world, took notice. The morning after the announcement, a local news crew arrived at her home in Ann Arbor, Mich. Ms. Bennett — still in her pajamas — opened the door to find herself face to face with a reporter and a camera.
Until that moment, “I’m thinking life is going to be like it was,” she said. Since then, Ms. Bennett, who has been a puzzle editor at The Times since 2020, has started to get used to the bit of fame that comes with editing a game that millions of people play every day.
She has been recognized at stores and pumped for Wordle hints by friends desperate to keep their streaks alive. She has given talks about the game at schools and event centers. This fall, she appeared on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen,” alongside her colleague Sam Ezersky, who edits Spelling Bee. Recently, she was one of many Times Games editors to be featured in Vanity Fair.
Over the past year, she has started to adjust to her minor celebrity, becoming a bit more relaxed before public appearances. Her solution selection process has relaxed a bit, too.
When she first took on the role, Ms. Bennett would start her Monday mornings with coffee and a random number generator. She’s the keeper of a database of a little over 2,330 possible Wordle solutions, each with an assigned number, which was compiled by Josh Wardle, the game’s creator. Ms. Bennett would take whichever number would pop up and match it to a corresponding word to make her selection. Occasionally, she adds words to the list.
Now, she sometimes opts to be a little more impulsive — and whimsical — opening a book of Adrienne Rich poems or Joni Mitchell lyrics and picking five-letter words from a random page. She scans the options for offensive meanings and to make sure answers don’t align too closely with events in the news cycle. This fall, for example, she decided against putting “virus” in the game — for now.
“One time, I randomly selected words, and I had ‘grope’ and ‘gonad’ in a row,” she said. “That doesn’t seem very wise.” (Needless to say, neither made it past her computer screen.)
As Wordle’s editor, it’s her job to make sure a string of words doesn’t share too much meaning, and to keep answers appropriate for players of all ages.
“Editing something that’s already great is actually a joy — it’s a privilege,” Ms. Bennett said. “My job is just getting obstacles to a fun experience out of the way.” Outside of her Wordle duties, Ms. Bennett still edits Times crosswords. (She has nothing to do with WordleBot, a tool from The Upshot that analyzes Wordle data.)
Like many avid puzzlers, Ms. Bennett has been assuredly focused on the craft for as long as she can remember. Family lore has her completing jigsaw puzzles at 17 months old, before she could talk. (Her sister, who Ms. Bennett said is highly empathetic, translated her pantomimed needs to their parents.)
She submitted her first commissioned crossword puzzle to Knitty, a magazine by and for knitters, and went on to manage copy editors at a math publication for more than two decades. The experience came in handy during a minor hiccup the first Thanksgiving after her appointment was announced. Her family dinner was interrupted when a small fervor took hold of Twitter in response to an answer she had selected: “feast,” the first clue to be themed in the game’s history.
“I spent 25 years in people management,” Ms. Bennett said. She learned to listen to criticisms, she said, and to “consider them separately from the vocal tone and intensity of the way it’s delivered.”
More than a year later, she said the “feast” fiasco was only a blip in her time editing the game. And, recently, players have even emailed her to request more themed solutions.
Appetites may change, she said, but the daily word challenge keeps people coming back.
“I get emails from people who have amazing stories,” she said, “and it’s moving to realize that I’m just picking a word, but sometimes it can really have this impact.”
That kind of sustained admiration is rare for any game, and perhaps more so for one that demands daily attention. Wordle’s appeal — and its consistent fervor — has led to talk show appearances, but despite it all, Ms. Bennett tries to find the thread that ties everything together.
She knows that people take their streaks seriously. But she hopes they don’t lose sight of the whimsy. And she has a theory as to why Wordle remains as popular as ever.
“Language is one of the first things that connects us to other people,” she said. With Wordle, “every day is something different, and it connects you with everyone else.”
