Josh Wardle

Josh Wardle is a Welsh software engineer who developed the viral web-based word game ''Wordle''. The New York Times Company acquired ''Wordle'' from Wardle in late January 2022. He also created the collaborative experimental project r/place for Reddit. Wardle lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In 2022, Wardle was named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People of the year.

Early life and education

Wardle is from South Wales, and he was brought up on an organic livestock farm in Llanddewi Rhydderch near Abergavenny.

He attended university at Royal Holloway, University of London and earned a degree in Media Arts. A few years later, he moved to the United States to attend the University of Oregon, where he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Art.

He has three brothers, one of whom is documentary filmmaker Tim Wardle, director of the 2018 film '' Three Identical Strangers''.

Career

Reddit and Pinterest

After completing graduate school, Wardle moved to Oakland, California, and began working as an artist at Reddit in 2011. He later became one of Reddit's first product managers and served in this position on the community engineering team. As a community engineering product manager, he created popular collaborative experimental projects such as The Button in 2015 and Place in 2017.

He left Reddit for almost two years to work as a software engineer at Pinterest, before returning to Reddit also as a software engineer.

''Wordle''

In 2013, Wardle made a prototype of word game ''Wordle'', a play on his last name. Wardle's initial name for the game was ''Mr. Bugs' Wordy Nugz.''

In January 2021, he returned to his 2013 prototype to create a word game for his partner, Palak Shah. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he and Shah had played many ''New York Times'' games including Spelling Bee, and he wanted to make a new word game that they could play together. Shah played a vital role in the game's development before it went public. She reviewed the 12,000 five-letter words in the English language and narrowed them down to 2,500 commonly-known words that could be used in the daily puzzle.

From January to June 2021, Wardle and Shah played the game in secret. First, Wardle shared the game with his family members before posting it on his websit
Powerlanguage.co.uk
and making it widely available in October 2021. The game had 90 players by November 1, 2021, within a month of Wardle making it public. One month later the game had 300,000 daily players, which rose to two million by the following week. ''Wordle'' had no advertisements and Wardle's goal was not to make money. Despite ''Wordle'''s success, Wardle did not want operating the game to become his full-time job.

In January 2022, The New York Times Company announced that it had acquired ''Wordle'' "for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures."

MSCHF

From December 2021 to May 2023, Wardle worked as a software engineer at Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF.

Powerlanguage and Gremco Industries

Since May 2023, Wardle has worked as a freelance creative consultant and game designer through his company Powerlanguage. In July 2024, he gave a presentation at the Figma Config conference that introduced him as an artist and software engineer at Gremco Industries.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wardle, Josh
Living people
Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London
University of Oregon alumni
British software engineers
Year of birth missing (living people)
Reddit people
21st-century Welsh engineers