Photo: TikTok
Warning: this might make the game slightly less fun.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Jan 26, 2022
Everyone loves a good word game. I myself have had Wordscapes for years now and have been frequently revisiting it — returning to the hundreds of levels I’ve beaten.
Well, there’s a new word game craze in town and it’s called, “Wordle.”
Wordle is very simple: every day, there’s a new 5-letter word on the website for people to try and guess — originally created by Josh Wardle for his partner who loves word games.
Every word you input gives you hints as to letter placements or if they even exist in the word.
But what if you could guess the Wordle word every single day in one try?
A TikToker by the name of Casey Johnson, @caseyjohnsonwv on the app, had the exact same thought and decided to figure out if he could make it possible.
How to win Wordle every time you play.
Johnson has tapped into how to hack Wordle and reveal the correct answers. If winning means that much to you, it could be worth a try.
His original video, which has received just under 4,000 views, sets out to accomplish this feat through the use of developer tools on the website itself.
“Now, designing and building web applications can be super complicated. There’s all kinds of architecting that goes into it,” he explains.
“All you need to know is it’s much faster to get data from your browser than it is to make a call to the server, so all the important data for the game is already stored in the browser when you load it.”
Think about what that means for a second…you got it? That’s right, the data for the correct word is already right in front of you, you just have to find it.
It’s not in some magical database server at the Wordle headquarters, the information is right there on your Google Chrome browser.
Unfortunately, he does mention a disclaimer, adding that you’ll need a computer to do this because he doesn’t know of any browsers or tools on mobile devices to be able to do that.
Basically what he does, is he goes into the developer tools, looks through the storage shared to the browser, and is able to find the answer right there, every day, for him to get right every time at his leisure.
There's also a hack to find every future Wordle answer.
Johson's follow-up video has gone viral with nearly 300,000 views and shows people how they can find EVERY Wordle word that has ever existed and will ever exist.
“I started working on a Python bot that would e-mail the Wordle solutions to my enemies at midnight every night,” he said, but added that it was really hard for him to automate, so instead he thought, “what if we could just steal the answers from the server?”
Johnson worked his technological magic and found a server request that was sending the actual Javascript game code over to the browser.
“Deep within the code, I found two lists of words. One of them is every valid guess you could make, every single acceptable word is here,” he explained. “The other list — which I’ve redacted so y’all don’t murder me — is every Wordle solution there has ever been, or ever will be.”
And just like that, America’s current favorite word puzzle has been broken — of course, it’s entirely up to you whether or not you want to break it.
“So, if you have enemies that really, really care about playing the game Wordle,” he said, “you can ruin their day by sending them all of the solutions right now.”
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.