If you’re proud to play Quordle, the five-letter word game that’s four times as challenging as Wordle, then your search for the perfect word has been validated. On Thursday, popular online puzzle app Conundrum was acquired by dictionary authority Merriam-Webster.

After Wordle became a hit on the internet in late 2021, Merriam-Webster, which is owned by Encyclopedia Britannica, surreptitiously acquired the company behind the new game.

It’s easy to see the inspiration for Quordle in Wordle. Quordle is like Wordle, however instead of trying to figure out a five-letter word in five guesses, you have to figure out four five-word puzzles at once in nine tries.

Both have a conventional virtual keyboard, and once you predict a five-letter word, the corresponding letters will show on all four boards. Letters in the proper positions are coloured green, while those in the erroneous positions are coloured orange. That’s right, it’s the same as Wordle.

The key distinction is that in Quordle, a given set of letters may be used immediately for all four challenges. With just nine tries total, you are tackling four riddles simultaneously.

The purchase was revealed on the official Quordle Twitter account, and the former URL for the service (https://www.quordle.com) now redirects to the Merriam-Webster homepage.

Although Quordle hasn’t yet attracted the same devoted following as Wordle (maybe because of its complexity), Merriam-support Webster’s might help alter that.

But until last Friday, not many people knew that Merriam-Webster had bought Quordle the year before.

“The company’s creator thought highly of us for housing the goods.

Both me and the editors at the magazine loved it. Agreements were reached quickly and amicably, “On Friday, Merriam-Webster President Gregory Barlow shared this information with me.

As Barlow said, the dictionary site made only minor adjustments to Quordle after purchasing it for an unknown fee, such as adding the Merriam-Webster logo late last month. Until Thursday (January 19), when they transferred the whole Quordle platform and URL to Merriam-servers, Webster’s Quordle developer Freddie Meyer kept the news to himself on Twitter.

Fans of Quordle should not anticipate major changes despite the new URL.

“There won’t be any changes on my end. We will be adding new features and perhaps even new game kinds, but I don’t think the basic game that people play on a daily basis will be changing anytime soon.”

In addition, Merriam-Webster has no intentions to restrict access to Quordle to paying customers. A lot of serious gamers will appreciate that. A total of 410,000,000 games of Quordle have been played in the previous six months, as reported by Barlow’s 29.7,000,000 users.

I asked Barlow whether there were any fears that the New York Times might go after the more popular Quordle for being too similar to Wordle.

“No. This is not a rip-off of Wordle. We enjoy Quordle so much since it’s such a distinct game. The requirement of using four words results in a dramatic shift in gameplay and strategy.”