Wordle is unique in that it’s an addiction you can’t indulge to your detriment. It’s like one of those after-dinner chocolate mints you get at Olive Garden: it lasts a couple of minutes and you want more, but you won’t get more until the next time you’re manipulated into eating at Olive Garden. Or, in the case of Wordle, until after midnight.

This is anomalous on the internet, where social media apps are designed to keep you scrolling and staring, headlines are A/B tested and tweaked to keep you clicking, and games are made lurid to keep you playing. With most online activity, you can become so enthralled that the need to use the toilet is a serious inconvenience.

What’s Wordle? It’s an online word game, and it works like this: You have six opportunities to guess a hidden five-letter word. When you make a guess, any letter contained in the answer is highlighted—yellow for correct letters, green for correct letters in the correct place. Letters not contained in the answer are grayed out. With each guess you gain information about which letters to include or exclude in your next guess. When you guess the correct word, you get a short congratulatory message and the game is over. If you fail to guess the correct word after six attempts, the game is over and the answer is revealed. You can’t load or play a new round until the next day. It’s one and done—until midnight when the Wordle is reset.

Though Wordle is unique in the world of online games, it’s not entirely alone in its antiaddictive properties. The New York Times’ other word puzzles—the Crossword, Mini Crossword, and Spelling Bee—are also dailies. As a dabbler in those puzzles, I know there are devotees. But to be devoted means to play once a day. And to play means to spend a few minutes, perhaps as many as sixty, but probably more like two to ten. They are more treat than temptation, more diversion than distraction.

And yet Wordle is further unique in the subset of word puzzles. The NYT’s crossword puzzles, for example, play on knowledge—of history, music, art, television, literature, food, entertainment, news media—and more specifically on pop cultural knowledge. You’re given a prompt or a hint, like “name-brand version of Olive Garden-like mints,” and you must identify the correct answer: “Andes.” And while you can solve a crossword by getting a word or two and then deducing others from the given letters, it helps to be aware of what’s happening in the world. At least this is true for the NYT’s crosswords. Some crosswords contain words related to a hobby, theme, or branch of knowledge.

Other word puzzles play on vocabulary more than topical or cultural knowledge. The Spelling Bee, for example, another NYT puzzle, consists of seven scrambled letters. The goal is to find as many dictionary words as possible using four or more letters, barring proper nouns and swear words. You gain points for the quantity of letters used in your word entries, and for the quantity of words you find. So while you don’t need to be acculturated to succeed in Spelling Bee, it helps to have a large vocabulary, or you would think so.

This raises a question: Is there a difference between knowledge and vocabulary? Certainly one’s vocabulary is a kind of knowledge, and to learn any new word, however insignificant, is to increase one’s knowledge. But can you gain knowledge without building your vocabulary? Can you be culturally astute, for example, and verbally obtuse? To put it another way, can you increase your knowledge of history or music or philosophy or wingsuit flying, for that matter, without learning new words and their meanings?

Of course, it probably helps to have a large vocabulary and broad knowledge to play any word puzzle. But Wordle is unique in that it doesn’t require either, for Wordle is at heart a guessing game. And it plays on logic and instinct more than vocabulary or knowledge.

You already know that a crossword gives you a hint—a kind of definition—and identifying the correct word in large part depends on having knowledge of that definition. Other word puzzles play on vocabulary—knowledge of words themselves. But with Wordle there are no definitions from which to work and no restricted set of letters from which to construct or “find” words, other than the twenty-six in the English alphabet. You begin with a guess. A shot in the dark.

What would be a wise first guess? Well, this is where logic comes into play, and there are probably a billion articles on the interwebs about the best word with which to open a round of Wordle. For my own experience, I knew from playing Scrabble as a kid that the letters A, E, D, N, R, S, and T—to name a few—appear in English words more often than do others. So that’s where I started when I first played.

If you think similarly, you might lead with START. But here again you are confronted with logic. Given that you have a limited number of guesses—six—it wouldn’t be prudent to use T twice when you could check another variable, in this case a variable being a letter. So while T is more common among English words than is K, you’d do better to lead with STARK, not because STARK is necessarily a great opener, but because it’s more advantageous to test five variables instead of four. Better yet, you might lead with STAND or DARTS or STEAD.

For every letter you test, you gain a bit of information: either it is or isn’t in the hidden word, and either it is or isn’t in the right place. With that feedback, you can try a new combination of letters, namely, a new word. And with each guess, your chance of getting the right word increases, assuming you use the information you’ve gained. Think of it like this: each five-letter word represents a different key. If the key doesn’t fit, you revise it, drawing on the bits of information you’ve gained until you can “unlock” the hidden word. In other words, playing Wordle is more like cracking a code than spelling a word or assessing your knowledge. It’s more cryptographic than vocabularic.

To play Wordle is to do all this naturally, almost without thinking, or at least without noticing you are thinking. And it makes sense you wouldn’t think about your thinking in this situation because reasoning is a function of who we are. It’s one of the primary attributes that makes us human. Since Aristotle, and perhaps before him, homo sapiens has been called the “rational animal.” Setting a small logical puzzle in front of a person is like setting a mouse in front of a cat or a cat in front of a dog: he’s gonna pounce on it. So while training in logic or probability theory might improve your Wordle gameplaying, you don’t need either, for your rational mind will go to work.

You also don’t need a large vocabulary. You don’t need to know words to be able to construct them. Most literate elementary kids can ascertain the spelling of a word from hearing it (think of our spelling bees), because in addition to being rational animals, we have what is often called the “language instinct.” Complex language—and our seemingly innate ability to learn it—is another primary attribute of homo sapiens. Even young children can guess the daily Wordle correctly, regardless of whether they’ve seen or heard it, regardless of whether they know its meaning, simply by combining consonants and vowels according to rules familiar to them.

I’ve watched my own adolescent children do this. They successfully guessed SWILL, TACIT, CAULK, and CYNIC, for example, though they weren’t sure they had ever seen or heard the words. Why? Because logos.

And because luck. At the end of the day, success in Wordle depends on luck. In this sense, it’s a lot like life: after much reasoning and deliberation, sometimes the best choice is still unclear, so you guess.

This is probably why my kids enjoy the game. They aren’t yet old enough to find pleasure in the crossword published by the iconic news outlet of the world’s cultural hub. It’s one thing to know the “equivalent note to C sharp” or the “philosophical concept opposed by determinism,” just two examples of recent crossword hints, and another to find the five-lettered key that is the Wordle.

By the way, a puzzle is something you play alone; a game you play with others. You might solicit help from a friend if you get stumped, but to play Wordle with another person is to rob yourself of the pleasure of solving the puzzle. So, you play it alone. And then, when you’ve solved it, you “play” with others—usually in the form of talking shit or talking strategy. `

Speaking of shit, Wordle has given new meaning to the short word. We’ve long obsessed over those four-letter words that are both revered and reviled: fuck, cunt, shit, piss, dick, damn, hell. Now millions obsess over the five-letter word, and they’re finding joy in it. I look forward to the day when they curse it, curse Wordle for its use of crypt, nymph, hymns, tryst, or myrrh—vowelless words sure to frustrate and please.

And speaking of strategy, to play Wordle is to develop one. The goal is to guess the hidden word. Strategy is the method by which you pursue that goal. Is strategy different than the reasoning that goes into making educated guesses? Yes, somewhat. You can reason about which word to guess, and you can reason about your reasoning. In other words, strategy implies methodology, boundaries, rules you set for yourself that you think will increase your odds of guessing the Wordle with fewer attempts. For example, some people always lead with a word that contains four vowels—like ADIEU or AUDIO—a strategy based on the prevalence of vowels in English. I, on the other hand—and I’m sure others do this too—lead with an intuitive guess. Why? Because I believe in the efficacy of intuition, that it too, like reason, is a tool of discernment. Besides that, I’m interested in testing intuition against the cold, hard straightforwardness of probability. It’s more fun for me, and I like going against the grain, sometimes even the logical grain.

But this is not why I find joy in Wordle. I find joy in Wordle because it has lured my three daughters into playing with words. As a father who studied philosophy and English, who makes a living as a copywriter and editor, who prefers the dictionary to Netflix and Wikipedia to pickle ball, I love Wordle because it has allowed me to share with my children, in some small way, the interestingness of language and logic. Wordle is unique in that it’s fun for people who aren’t logophiles.

And yet to play is to exercise logos, which, from the Greek λόγος, means “I say,” or “that which is thought” and “that which is said.” Philosophers and psychologists say logos is the principle of reason and judgment, the very essence of our being, the divine seat of our humanness. As Saint John purportedly noted, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Words represent reality. And reality, in all its aspects, both internal and external, subjective and objective, whether independent from or dependent on mind, can only be experienced in the mind. All that exists, in other words, is subject to understanding. If in reason we make meaning—make sense of what it means to be human—it is primarily through words that we convey it.

Words. All these words about an elegant and unique little puzzle called Wordle. So few about this joyous mystery called life.