Remember when Wordle was a thing? The game is still around – you can now play it on The New York Times’ website – but its initial popularity was seriously unprecedented.  

And now, the hype surrounding Wordle has been commemorated in the Cambridge Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year: homer. While it may seem like a random choice if you weren’t a hardcore Wordler back in the day, for those who have been dedicated to the game since early 2022, the word may prove a bit of a sore spot.

Why? Let us explain. If you haven’t come across the word homer before, you’re not alone. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it’s short for ‘home run’ – “a point scored in baseball when you hit the ball, usually out of the playing field, and are able to run around all the bases at one time to the starting base”. 

Of course, baseball is a mostly American sport, so it’s not a term many of us come across every day. And that’s where the Wordle link comes in.  

On 5 May, homer was the Wordle solution – leaving many Brits who are unfamiliar with the word pretty confused. After many people failed to solve the puzzle, Cambridge Dictionary saw a huge surge of people (over 65,000) coming to the site to find out what the word meant – and it was this that led the dictionary to make homer its word of the year.

“This informal American English term for a home run in baseball left players of Wordle who were not familiar with the word feeling confused and frustrated,” the website reads. 

“Tens of thousands of these Wordle players took to the Cambridge Dictionary to understand the meaning of the word homer.” 

It continues: “Homer was not the only five-letter word that saw a spike in searches in 2022. Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s most popular online dictionary by page views, saw bursts of searches for many five-letter words in 2022 as the ‘Wordle effect’ took hold.

“Among the long list of these five-letter words are humor (the American spelling of humour), and words like caulk, tacit and bayou, which prove that short words aren’t always easy ones!”

If one thing’s for sure, Wordle has certainly left its mark on the world – and while Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year may not be quite so damning as Collins Dictionary’s “permacrisis”, it’s still just as good a reminder of the rollercoaster ride of a year we’ve all experienced.  

Image: Getty