Who doesn't love Wordle, the little word game that has

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the

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by

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? We play

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day ourselves.

But Wordle isn't exactly unique.

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were similar

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that came before. In fact, its origins can be traced back to Mastermind, a children's

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game with different colored pegs. It was invented by a Romanian-born Israeli Jew, Mordecai Meirowitz, in 1970.

And Mastermind itself can

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its origins back to "

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and Cows", a computer game written back in the 1960s. It used numbers, not letters or colors.

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, there are no original

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left.