Quordle Answers for July 20 Show Merriam-Webster’s Bet Still Pays Off

Quordle’s four answers on Monday, July 20 are ICING, SLICK, GAILY and RISEN, words hidden behind clues about cake decorating, hockey rules, spilled oil and rising dough. Forbes contributor Kris Holt runs the daily column that supplied Monday’s clues, and one of the four words repeats a letter, the only real twist in an otherwise mid-difficulty grid.

There is a business story behind the puzzle too. Merriam-Webster bought Quordle for an undisclosed sum in January 2023, betting that a homemade Wordle spinoff could turn into a daily habit worth owning. More than three years later, the fact that outlets are still writing daily hint columns about it, including this one, suggests the bet worked.

Today’s Quordle Hints, Grid by Grid

Quordle runs four Wordle-style grids at once. Every guess a player types lands on all four boards simultaneously, and solvers get nine total tries to close out the whole puzzle. Here is Monday’s clue set, word by word.

• Top left – something bakers spread on cakes, and a whistle-worthy infraction in hockey.
• Top right – as smooth and slippery as a spilled patch of oil.
• Bottom left – done in a cheerful, lighthearted way.
• Bottom right – what the sun does shortly after dawn, or what dough does once it finishes proofing.

Holt added two more nudges for Monday’s grid: one of the four answers repeats a letter, and the words start with I, S, G and R.

Monday’s Quordle Answers Are Icing, Slick, Gaily and Risen

Spoiler warning stands here for anyone still solving in another tab.

ICING carries the repeated letter Holt flagged, with two I’s doing the work. The other three words play out clean, no repeats, which is usually where Quordle grids turn from tricky to manageable.

The Undisclosed Bet Merriam-Webster Made on a Wordle Clone

Quordle did not start as anyone’s business plan. Engineer David Mah built an early prototype, and Freddie Meyer took that code and reworked it, drawing on Dordle, another two-grid Wordle clone, for the format. Quordle went live in February 2022, and it gained one million players within its first two months online, according to contemporaneous reporting on the launch.

Creator Freddie Meyer said at the time that he had no plans to monetize the game, though ads appeared on the page as an alternative to asking for donations. Then, in January 2023, Merriam-Webster acquired Quordle for a sum it never disclosed. Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, said the game was “a favorite” inside the company and that it would “make a great addition” to the dictionary publisher’s lineup of games and quizzes.

Meyer marked the sale with a short statement of his own.

I’m delighted to announce that Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster! I can’t think of a better home for this game.

That was Freddie Meyer, writing publicly about the deal as it closed. The game now runs on Merriam-Webster’s own four-board Quordle page, still free, still ad-supported, still handing out a fresh set of four words every day.

Wordle Wrote the Playbook a Year Before Quordle Existed

Quordle’s sale followed a template The New York Times had already tested. About a year earlier, the Times bought the original Wordle from creator Josh Wardle for a reportedly low-seven-figure sum, then grew its games section around that single free puzzle rather than locking it behind a paywall right away.

Wordle’s success set off a wave of homemade spinoffs chasing the same audience, each pushing the format somewhere new.

• Dordle – two grids at once, the format that inspired Quordle’s own build.
• Octordle – eight five-letter grids, with the guess limit stretched to thirteen.
• Duotrigordle – thirty-two boards, built for players chasing the longest possible daily grind.
• Nerdle – the same deduction format applied to math equations instead of words.
• Absurdle – an adversarial version where the hidden answer shifts based on each guess.
• Heardle – a music-guessing clone that Spotify bought in 2022, the same year it launched.

Quordle stood out from that crowd by staying difficult without becoming a gimmick, and that is largely why a 200-year-old dictionary brand wanted it.

What the Original Bet Paid Back in Numbers

Nobody has published exact figures for what Quordle itself generates. But Wordle’s track record inside The New York Times gives the clearest public read on what this kind of bet can return, and it is the same bet Merriam-Webster made on a smaller scale.

Digital subscribers climbed 42.65% over that stretch, and revenue rose 42.86% to reach $1.10 billion, according to a breakdown of Wordle’s effect on NYT subscriptions. By the first quarter of 2024, 82.69% of the paper’s organic website traffic landed on the Wordle page alone, and the NYT Games app was pulling roughly 1 million downloads a month through Apple’s App Store, five times the download rate of the paper’s main news app and worth close to $2 million a month in App Store revenue on its own.

Merriam-Webster is not chasing numbers on that scale. But the same mechanism, a free daily puzzle that drags people back every morning, is exactly what it paid an undisclosed sum to own.

Why Do So Many Outlets Publish Quordle Hints Every Day?

Because the audience never really left. Millions of people still open Quordle each morning, and enough of them get stuck that hint columns remain one of the most reliable traffic draws in casual gaming coverage, which is why the format has outlasted almost every other Wordle-era spinoff still standing.

Forbes runs one such column daily. TechRadar keeps its own, with a staffer who has written dozens of pieces on Wordle-style games for more than two years. Smaller dedicated blogs track nothing but Quordle and its Merriam-Webster siblings, updating every morning with fresh solutions. This site has run the same daily breakdown for months, stretching back through entries like the May 12 rundown of that day’s four solutions.

The habit runs across the rest of the NYT Games portfolio too. Strands, the newspaper’s newer word-search puzzle, recently walked solvers through a supersized business story tucked inside its theme, proof that the hint-writing habit was never unique to one puzzle or one publisher.

Quordle’s own numbers stay private. But more than three years after an undisclosed check changed hands, a dictionary company is still running a word game popular enough to need daily instructions, and that is the return Merriam-Webster paid for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Quordle owned by the same company as Wordle?

No. Wordle belongs to The New York Times, which bought it from creator Josh Wardle for a reportedly low-seven-figure sum. Quordle belongs to Merriam-Webster, a unit of Encyclopaedia Britannica that is controlled by Swiss investment banker Jacqui Safra. The two puzzles share a format, not a parent company.

How does Quordle’s nine-guess limit compare with harder spinoffs like Octordle?

Quordle gives solvers nine guesses to fill four five-letter grids at once. Octordle doubles the board count to eight and stretches the limit to thirteen guesses, while Duotrigordle pushes the format to thirty-two boards for players chasing an even longer daily session.

What happens if you miss a day of Quordle?

Quordle offers a practice mode that lets players run endless extra grids at any time, so missing a day does not lock anyone out of the game itself. The daily puzzle simply resets with a new set of words the next day.

Is Quordle free to play?

Yes. Creator Freddie Meyer said early on that he had no plans to monetize the game, and Merriam-Webster has kept it free, supported by ads on the page rather than a subscription.

What other word games sit alongside Quordle on Merriam-Webster’s site?

Merriam-Webster’s games hub also runs Blossom, a letter-building game in the same family as Spelling Bee, and The Missing Letter, a daily crossword-style puzzle, alongside a rotating slate of quizzes.