After completing graduate school, Wardle moved to Oakland, California, and began working as an artist at Reddit in 2011. He later became one of Reddit's first product managers and served in this position on the community engineering team. As a community engineering product manager, he created popular collaborative experimental projects such as The Button in 2015 and Place in 2017.[2]
He left Reddit for almost two years to work as a software engineer at Pinterest, before returning to Reddit also as a software engineer.[10]
In 2013, while working at Reddit, Wardle made a prototype of word game Wordle, a play on his last name.[3]
In January 2021, he returned to his 2013 prototype to create a word game for his partner, Palak Shah. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he and Shah had played many New York Times games including Spelling Bee, and he wanted to make a new word game that they could play together. Shah played a vital role in the game's development before it went public. She reviewed the 12,000 five-letter words in the English language and narrowed them down to 2,500 commonly-known words that could be used in the daily puzzle.[3]
From January to June 2021, Wardle and Shah played the game in secret.[11] First, Wardle shared the game with his family members before posting it on his website Powerlanguage.co.uk and making it widely available in October 2021.[7] The game had 90 players by 1 November, within a month of Wardle making it public. One month later the game had 300,000 daily players, which rose to two million by the following week.[12]Wordle had no advertisements and Wardle's goal was not to make money. Despite Wordle's success, Wardle did not want operating the game to become his full-time job.[13]
In January 2022, The New York Times Company announced that it had acquired Wordle "for an undisclosed price in the low-seven figures."[1]
