"order" doesn't mean "one follows the other" it means sorted or grouped in some fashion. Whether they're subject to copyright is practically speaking case-by-case: "World cities by population", no, "curated list of the best five-letter words for a game like Wordle"? Eh. Wouldn't want to fight NYT over it.

There's a nuance there though, in Europe while there's probably no copyright on the words per se, they have a separate but related database rights (which exactly sounds what you think).

The design and feel of the site is probably unarguably copyrighted though. While other clones could argue that Wordle is actually a derivation from a much older game, it won't probably help if the design, feel, "dress" and colours are one-to-one to the original thing.

> I would also love to hear the justification.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia editors' terse description on curated lists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_in_lists#S...

A fact you may not know is that the creator and his partner curated the two lists of words-accepted-as-guesses and words-eligible-to-be-daily-targets to remove so-called "Scrabble gibberish."

Game rules in general are not copyrightable.

There were some lawsuits about Tetris. You can make a game with the rules like Tetris. But you cannot name it Tetris, and you cannot make it look too much like Tetris.

I doubt they'll ever monetize Wordle directly, but the links it displays when you solve a puzzle and in the menu definitely drive traffic to their puzzles that they do monetize. I tried them, and seriously considered subscribing so I could keep playing Spelling Bee (I ultimately decided against it).

I think there's a little more work involved into writing a book than into randomly shuffling a list of words.