Vārdulis

About Vārdulis

Vārdulis (a play on vārds, "word") is a Latvian word game modelled on Wordle. It was built in January 2022 by Matīss Rikters, who published the code on GitHub, and players soon shared their numbered results online, such as "Vārdulis 18 5/6".

The day's puzzle follows the familiar pattern. You type a five-letter Latvian word and press Ievadīt (enter); each tile then turns a colour that shows how close the letter is, and you have six tries to find the word. After the game, the page links to a thesaurus entry for the day's word so you can look it up.

The keyboard is laid out for Latvian, with long vowels (Ā, Ē, Ī, Ū) and letters such as Č, Ģ, Ķ, Ļ, Ņ, Š and Ž as their own keys, which makes the letter-elimination game quite different from English. A calendar button lets you pick a date and play earlier words.

Rikters and Sanita Reinsone wrote up what the game's data showed in the paper "How Masterly Are People at Playing with Their Vocabulary?" at the Baltic HLT 2022 conference. Vārdulis suits Latvian speakers and learners who want a short daily puzzle; it is free and needs no account.

How to play Vārdulis

1. Open Vārdulis and type a five-letter Latvian word on the on-screen keyboard.
2. Press Ievadīt to submit the guess.
3. Read the tile colours: they show whether each letter is in the right place, in the word elsewhere, or not in the word.
4. Use the clues for your next guess and find the word within six tries.
5. Share your result or open the calendar to play an earlier day.

Tips

• Treat long vowels and letters with marks as different letters: A and Ā are separate.
• Try common Latvian word endings such as -as, -is and -us early to test the last letters.
• After solving, follow the thesaurus link to learn the day's word.

Questions