In the cool of winter, developer Rikito Ohnishi played , an English-language word game that has shot across the internet with blistering virality. It was, he wrote, straightforward and interesting: A new puzzle every day, with a single five-letter-word solution, discovered through six consecutive guesses.
But he had one qualm.
¡°I had difficulty entering words because I don¡¯t speak English well,¡± he tells The Japan Times via email. To remedy this, Ohnishi created , a Japanese variation on the Wordle format ¡ª with kana in place of the alphabet. Each five-kana word is drawn from Japanese vocabulary databases.
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