  Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a
secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to
discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be
words from $D$, all words in $D$ having the same length $k$. After each guess,
the player is notified of the positions in which their guess matches the secret
word, as well as letters in the guess that appear in the secret word in a
different position. We study the game of Wordle from a complexity perspective,
proving NP-hardness of its natural formalization: to decide given a dictionary
$D$ and an integer $\ell$ if the player can guarantee to discover the secret
word within $\ell$ guesses. Moreover, we prove that hardness holds even over
instances where words have length $k = 5$, and that even in this case it is
NP-hard to approximate the minimum number of guesses required to guarantee
discovering the secret word. We also present results regarding its
parameterized complexity and offer some related open problems.
