Josh Wardle

Josh Wardle is a Welsh software engineer, best known for developing the viral web-based word game Wordle. The New York Times Company acquired Wordle from Wardle in late January 2022. Wardle currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

After completing graduate school, Wardle moved to Oakland, California, and started as an artist at Reddit in 2011. He later became one of Reddit's first product managers, serving as a product manager for the community engineering team. In this position, he created popular collaborative experimental games such as The Button in 2015 and Place in 2017. In 2013, while working at Reddit, Wardle made a prototype of word game Wordle, a play on his last name.

In January 2021, he returned to his 2013 prototype to create a word game for his partner, Palak Shah. Shah played a vital role in the game's development before it went public. She reviewed the English language's 12,000 five-letter words and narrowed them down to 2,500 commonly-known words that could be used in the daily puzzle.

At first, only Wardle's family played Wordle, until Wardle made it widely available in October 2021 by posting it on his own website, powerlanguage[.]co.uk. Wordle had no advertisements and Wardle's goal was not to make money. Since December 2021, he has been a software engineer at Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF, which created Lil Nas X's Satan Shoes.

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