A word or two of praise here for Wordle, the latest word in viral internet wordplay.

Do you Wordle? I don’t. Despite a career built entirely on words, I’ve never been much interested in their value as pastime pursuits.

Crossword puzzles? Yawn. Scrabble? Meh. Anagram jumbles? Bleh. Those big grids that invite you to see how many actual words you can find concealed amid the random letters? No chance.

My wife, who also works in the word business, finds some of the games diverting. From time to time I hear her exclaim her genius status, as reckoned by The New York Times game Spelling Bee.

Seven letters are provided for each Spelling Bee contest, arranged in a honeycomb (get it?) shape with six letters surrounding one in the center. The object is to make as many words as possible from those letters, with the added catch that all must employ the center letter.

Short of genius, the game also commends play as “solid” or “amazing.” Kayne does not exclaim about those lesser rankings.

Wordle has more recently hooked her, along with millions of others. If you’re not among them, you probably know someone who is.

The object is to divine a five-letter word through a succession of guesses. For each guess the correct letters show up in gold, and correct letters in the right places show up in green. Gray signifies a miss. A maximum of six tries is allowed.

My wife’s record for the correct answer is two. The only way to do better is to guess the right word from the get-go, out of the thousands available. The equivalent of a hole-in-one.

Wordle is similar to a four-letter word game I briefly played with friends decades ago, which I knew of no name for other than “the four-letter word game.” (No. Not that kind of four-letter words.)

There being no internet then, we simply kept track of the progress on notebook paper, much the way medieval scribes probably would have played it in the 11th century. The internet version makes everything easier, and eliminates the possibility of human error in tallying hits and misses.

Another internet advantage for Wordle: It allows players to share their scores with online friends.

My first praise for Wordle is based on a personal bias. I am colorblind – or, as I prefer to describe it, color-vision impaired. As such I have spent a lifetime complaining about colorized charts, maps and such that ignore those of us who can’t tell blue from purple, green from brown, pink from gray or, at times, red from green.

Wordle offers a version for the c-v i, substituting light blue and orange squares for the original’s green and gold. Much easier to distinguish for those of us with color issues.

Wordle is not unique in that respect. I gather that quite a number of video games support colorblind mode, including various versions of Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL. So, good on them, too, though you couldn’t pay me to play them.

The second reason for praise is the creator of Wordle, Josh Wardle, didn’t seem interested in making money from it. The software engineer says he created the game for himself and his partner, the game’s name an obvious play on his own.

“I don’t understand why something can’t just be fun,” he told the BBC News. “I don’t have to charge people money for this and ideally would like to keep it that way.”

Then it was announced this week The New York Times is purchasing Wordle for an amount “in the low seven figures.”

I suspect the free days might be numbered, but Wardle sure must be having fun.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville. He can be reached at [email protected]