werdel

werdel takes the Wordle board and swaps letters for sounds. The hidden answer is a word shown in the International Phonetic Alphabet, five IPA symbols long, and every guess must be a real English word whose pronunciation is also five symbols. You type ordinary English spelling on the keyboard, and the game turns it into IPA on the board, so 'harbours' becomes hɑːbəz and 'scream' becomes skriːm.

After each guess, tiles turn green for a sound in the right place, yellow for a sound that is in the word somewhere else, and stay grey otherwise. A few rules make it its own puzzle: the game uses British Received Pronunciation, which is non-rhotic (no 'r' after vowels), long vowels such as iː or ɑː count as a single symbol different from their short partners, and the affricates tʃ and dʒ count as two symbols. That means the English spelling can be much longer or shorter than five letters.

You have eight guesses, two more than Wordle, to allow for the extra difficulty. Besides the daily word, which keeps a streak, there is an Hourly mode with a new word every hour and an Infinite mode for unlimited play. The game is credited as based on Josh Wardle's Wordle, with code from MikhaD's Wordle+.

It suits linguistics students, language teachers and word game players who want to think about how words sound rather than how they are spelled.