I felt a weird kind of mourning the other day. The quiet kind, where nothing dramatic happens, but you notice something’s missing. And, statistically speaking, you’ve probably felt it too, about a five-letter word game that used to start your day.

Back in February 2022, like half the planet, I started a Wordle WhatsApp group chat with 10 friends. Every morning, we’d post our green and yellow grids, brag about the lucky twos and console anyone stuck on five. It became our daily roll call, the first ping I saw every morning, a tiny glimpse into each other’s lives.

As a writer, I loved that it was about words, not whatever the algorithm wanted me to care about that day. People were arguing about etymology over breakfast. We shared our starter words like gossip (I was loyal to SPEAR, part strategy, part superstition; break it and I spiralled). For a brief, beautiful moment, the world had rediscovered the joy of language over likes.

But over time, the pings slowed. One person “took a break”. Another ghosted the grid. Someone else switched to Connections. Now, most days, it’s just me talking to myself in a chat called “Wordle”. And last week, for the first time ever, even I didn’t post.

I opened WhatsApp, stared at the blank grid, and realised I wasn’t just abandoning a chat. I was walking away from a ritual that had asked for nothing in return. That’s what made our Wordle chats so comforting, and why I went into mourning, like a lunatic, over a WhatsApp group. It was the only corner of the internet where being a word nerd was enough.

Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, called it “three minutes of joy a day”. No dopamine traps, no pressure. We weren’t performing relatability or fishing for engagement. We were just ... present.

A grid with no caption, no context, no “thoughts??”, no replies, reactions or witty commentary required. It was the kind of interaction that used to happen naturally before we all became content creators in our own group chats.

At its peak in early 2022, Wordle was pulling in more than 2 million players a day. According to WordFinder’s analysis of Google Trends, by mid-February 2022, global searches for “Wordle” were about 20 times higher than searches for “COVID-19″, briefly making it Google’s most-searched term globally. But like every viral game before it, the hype was impossible to sustain. By late 2022, daily Wordle posts on Twitter/X had fallen by more than 90 per cent, as people moved onto the next fix. Yet, the game itself never died: The New York Times says it had more than 5 billion plays last year.

In other words, we didn’t stop playing, we just stopped talking about it, perhaps because once the novelty faded, posting squares felt empty, like talking to yourself. And in an internet built on engagement, silence can feel like failure.

Now my group chats are all admin or outrage: whose turn it is to order dinner, who forgot the permission slip, who’s sharing another meme about hating both. “Hey brains trust,” someone starts, and the shouting begins.

Sure, I also have fun chats. My favourite recently was a The Summer I Turned Pretty thread, debriefing each time an episode dropped. For a moment, I had that old Wordle buzz, shared, wholesome, communal. Then the vibe shifted. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to just watch the show. You had to have takes. Be funny. Be quick. Be online at the exact moment everyone else was, or miss the thread entirely. Which was a much bigger commitment than five minutes on a Wordle. In real life, I talk to my friends normally, of course, but online, everything feels like it needs a polish now.

I scroll through my old Wordle chat sometimes. The grids are still there, green and yellow relics of a slower time. Between them are the usual life updates: babies, job changes, new haircuts, the odd meltdown. Our guesses became check-ins. Our words became stories.

Now those threads have been buried under the blur of everything else.

Every now and then, one of my old Wordle mates still sends a grid. I smile because it feels like a time capsule – five letters, six tries, nothing needs to be said.

Ali Berg is a Melbourne writer who once had a Wordle streak longer than most relationships. She’s the co-founder of the community book-sharing initiative, Books on the Rail, and the co-author of four bestselling romantic comedies.

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