What is a .dle game? The genre Wordle started

A dle game is a free daily puzzle you play in a browser, built on the model of Wordle. Everyone gets the same puzzle, a new one arrives on a schedule (usually at midnight), a round takes a few minutes, and the result can be shared as a grid that does not give the answer away. The "-dle" is borrowed from Wordle and stands for nothing.

Wordle gives you six guesses at a five-letter word, then refuses to play with you again until tomorrow. That refusal turned out to be the clever part. Since early 2022, thousands of games have borrowed the format. Most kept the last three letters of the name too, which is how Worldle, Heardle, Costcodle and LoLdle end up on the same phone without being related.

This is a guide to what makes something a .dle game, where the name comes from, and how the genre split into the families you see in the Alldle catalogue. At the time of writing it lists 1,767 of them.

What counts as a .dle game

A .dle game (also written "dle" or "-dle", or just called a Wordle-like) is a browser puzzle with four habits:

• Everybody gets the same puzzle. The answer you are stuck on is the answer your friend is stuck on.
• It resets on a schedule. Usually at midnight, sometimes at a fixed hour in one time zone, occasionally once a week.
• It takes minutes, not an evening. Most are done before the kettle boils.
• The result can be shared without spoiling it. Wordle's grid of green, yellow and grey squares is the famous example. It shows how your game went, never what the word was.

Most are also free, need no account and run fine in a phone browser. None of that is part of the definition, but it is so common that a game asking for a download feels like it has wandered in from somewhere else.

Games that let you play as many rounds as you like sit at the edge. They borrow the board and drop the daily reset, and for a lot of players the reset is the whole point. Alldle lists them but labels them as unlimited, so they don't hide among the daily ones.

What does "dle" mean?

Nothing on its own. "-dle" is the end of Wordle, and Wordle is a pun on the surname of the man who made it, Josh Wardle. You will see it spelled out as "daily logic exercise" in places, but that is a backronym that arrived later.

Wardle, a software engineer living in Brooklyn, made the game for his partner and put it online for everyone in October 2021. In December 2021 he added the share button, after noticing players in New Zealand typing their results out by hand as rows of coloured emoji. By late January 2022 millions of people were playing every day, and on 31 January The New York Times bought the game for a sum it described as "in the low seven figures."

The suffix did the rest. Worldle, built by the French developer Antoine Teuf, asks you to name a country from its outline and appeared within weeks. So did Nerdle, from Richard Mann, where the hidden answer is a sum. Each was made by someone who had noticed the same thing: the loop worked with almost any subject, and "-dle" told a stranger what kind of game they were about to open before they had opened it.

Heardle is the genre's cautionary tale. It played you the first second of a song and a little more after each wrong guess. Spotify bought it in July 2022 and shut it down on 5 May 2023, which is why the Heardles you find today are fan-made versions for a single decade or a single artist.

None of the mechanics were new. Lingo, an American game show from the late 1980s, was built on coloured letter feedback, and the pencil game Jotto and the board game Mastermind are older still. What Wordle added was scarcity: one puzzle, once a day, the same for everyone.

Why does one puzzle a day work?

Because it can't be binged. A puzzle that resets at midnight never turns into a chore, and since everyone has the same one, your result means something to the people you send it to. A friend who also needed six guesses knows exactly how your morning went. The shared grid shows the shape of your game but none of the letters, so you can post it in a group chat at seven in the morning without ruining anything for anyone.

It sounds like a limitation. It is the main feature.

Then there are streaks. Most .dle games count how many days in a row you have played, and losing a long streak to a missed alarm is a small, real grief that brings people back the next day to start again.

The main families

Four years of copies have sorted most .dle games into a handful of families. The table uses Alldle's own categories; the sections after it group them a little more loosely.

Word games

Still the largest family, by a distance. Some keep Wordle's board and multiply it. Dordle runs two grids at once, Quordle four, Octordle eight, and Sedecordle sixteen, at which point it stops being a relaxing start to the day. Others change what a guess tells you. Contexto and Semantle score each word by how close its meaning is to the answer, so spelling no longer helps at all. The rest are in word games.

Geography

Worldle started this branch with a silhouette. Globle replaced the outline with a globe that warms up as your guesses get closer, and Travle asks for a route between two countries through the ones in between. If maps are your thing, there is a longer guide to daily geography games.

Logic and maths

Nerdle brought the coloured tiles to arithmetic. Mathler turns it around: it tells you the result and leaves you to find the calculation. The category also holds older puzzle types that have simply adopted the daily reset, such as Shikaku of the Day, where you cut a grid into rectangles whose areas match the numbers inside them.

Film, TV and music

Framed shows you six frames from one film, one at a time. Bandle plays a song one instrument at a time, and Spotle hides one artist among a thousand. This is where knowing things matters more than reasoning about them.

Fandom guessers

The family nobody predicted is the one built around a single game or franchise. LoLdle asks for a League of Legends champion and Pokedle for a Pokémon, and each wrong guess tells you which of its attributes you got right. Most large fanbases now have one, and the video games category alone holds 138.

Trivia and oddities

Then there is everything else. Costcodle wants to know what an item costs at Costco. Searchle asks you to finish a Google autocomplete. They are hard to file anywhere, and they are often the ones people remember.

How to find the good ones

The honest problem with the genre is volume. When anyone can build a .dle game in a weekend, plenty of people do, and a lot of what gets built is Wordle with a different word list. A few things separate the games worth keeping:

• A twist you can explain in one sentence. Globle's hot and cold globe. Antiwordle, where every correct letter is bad news. If the pitch needs a paragraph, the game usually does too.
• A fair puzzle. Some games reach for obscure answers to seem hard. The good ones are hard because the deduction is tight.
• A reset you can count on. If yesterday's puzzle sometimes comes back, or the site is down every other week, the streak dies and the habit goes with it.
• The original, not a copy. Popular games get re-hosted, sometimes with adverts stacked on top. Alldle shows the domain of every listing so you can tell which is which.

The most played list is a reasonable place to start, because it ranks by what people actually open rather than by what anyone paid to feature. Pick a few that do different things, add them to your lineup, and they will be waiting in one place each morning. If Wordle is already covered, here are the games like Wordle worth trying next.