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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.