Wordle clone Quordle acquired by Merriam-Webster

techcrunch.com:

Merriam-Webster, the Encyclopædia Britannica subsidiary best known for its online dictionary, has acquired a popular Wordle clone called Quordle. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Little fanfare has been made around the acquisition, but the Quordle website now redirects to its own space on the Merriam-Webster website, while Quordle creator Freddie Meyer quietly issued this statement at the top of the Quordle tutorial section:

I’m delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster! I can’t think of a better home for this game. Lots of new features and fun to come, so stay tuned!

Quordle is one of a number of knock-offs that emerged in the wake of Wordle’s rise to world fame. Wordle, for the uninitiated, is a simple web-based game that gives users six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with color-coded clues served as feedback if they get any of the letters correct. The New York Times snapped up Wordle last January for a seven-figure sum, and in the intervening months the game has apparently attracted millions of new subscribers to the NYT’s Games offering. The media giant later integrated Wordle into its crossword app, and even turned Wordle into a physical board game.

It’s also worth noting that Spotify acquired a Wordle-inspired music guessing game called Heardle last summer, if we needed any further evidence of Wordle’s long-tail cultural and technological impact.

Quordle, for its part, builds on the basic Wordle concept, except there are four five-letter words to guess at once, with just nine tries. Each guess must be a genuine word, and each guess applies to each of the four words — the tiles change color to tell the user which guesses are correct, and whether a letter exists in that word but