Jargonle

How to play

One corporate buzzword, five letters, six guesses. Green means the letter is in the right place, yellow means it's in the word but somewhere else, grey means it isn't there. A new word appears every day, and everyone gets the same one — so a shared score is comparable.

Playing it well

Standard Wordle openers are the wrong tool here. The word list is corporate vocabulary, which is unusually heavy in vowels and in the letters A, E, I, L, N, R, S, T. An opener like ALIGN or SCALE tests more of the likely space than a general-purpose starter. Watch for doubled letters too — corporate words repeat letters more often than everyday English does.

Ways to play it

Hard mode carries forward every revealed letter, which sounds like a small constraint and roughly doubles the difficulty on a vocabulary this narrow. Speed mode gives you two minutes rather than six guesses. The office-league version has a team share grids in a channel each morning, and the useful part is not the scores but the pattern — after a fortnight everyone can see who opens with vowels and who opens with consonants, which turns out to correlate with almost nothing and generates a great deal of argument.

What people get wrong

Opening with a general-purpose Wordle starter wastes a guess. The word list is corporate vocabulary, unusually heavy in A, E, I, L, N, R, S and T, so an opener like ALIGN or SCALE tests far more of the actual space than ADIEU does. The second mistake is forgetting that corporate words double their letters more often than everyday English — if you have four letters placed and nothing fits, a repeat is usually the answer. The third is guessing a word you know is wrong to test letters when you only have two attempts left.

Meeting etiquette

The one toy here that's entirely safe in a meeting, because at a glance it looks like a spreadsheet. Sharing your grid afterwards is the whole social point — the emoji squares give away nothing about the word.

Where it comes from

Wordle's 2021 breakout produced hundreds of themed variants, most of which died within months. The ones that lasted shared a trait: a word list narrow enough to be learnable. A player who plays daily starts to internalize the corporate vocabulary, which is either a skill or a warning sign.

Questions people ask

Does everyone get the same word?

Yes, one per day for everyone, which is what makes a shared grid comparable. Comparing grids from different days proves nothing and people do it constantly.

Does the shared grid give the word away?

No. The emoji squares carry only position information, which is why the format spread in the first place.

What is a good opener?

ALIGN, SCALE and RAISE all test high-frequency letters for this list. There is no single best answer, but a general-English starter is measurably worse.