Unless you’ve been hibernating for the past few months, you’ve no doubt heard about the latest word-game craze called Wordle. I say “latest” because there have been a few over the past century or so and, as you might suspect, we’re going to look at some of the bigger ones today.

“FUN’S Word-Cross Puzzle,” which debuted in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper in late 1913, seems like a good place to start. Originally intended as a mostly solitary endeavor, crossword solving became a serious competition when The New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz started the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1978.

In 1933, Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect in Poughkeepsie, New York, came up with a scorable version of the crossword puzzle, which he called Lexico. By the time it really caught on in 1953, the game was called Scrabble and it was off and running. The North American version of Scrabble is made by the Milton Bradley division of Hasbro and uses Merriam-Webster’s “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” in sanctioned events.

Back in 2011, when his problems were much smaller, actor Alec Baldwin got himself kicked off an American Airlines flight after he refused to quit his game of Words With Friends (WWF) when asked to do so by a flight attendant.

A johnny-come-lately, WWF is a free online multiplayer game that looks and plays a lot like Scrabble, but includes a lot more chances for double- and triple-letter word scores. (Its website, wordswithfriends.com, says the game is “similar to other classic board games.”)

Such was Baldwin’s devotion to Words With Friends that its maker, Zynga, asked him to be a “brand ambassador” for the game’s 10th anniversary in 2019. Of course he responded “Y-E-S.”

And now we have Wordle, which was created by Brooklyn software engineer Josh Wardle for his wife, who loves word games. The online game gives players six chances to guess what the day’s five-letter word is. With each guess, the game gives you hints by turning a letter in your guess red if it correlates to the same letter in the same location of the secret word, or gold if a letter in your guess is contained in the secret word but in the wrong spot. In just the last two months of last year, the number of people playing Wordle increased from 90 a day to 300,000, making it the latest word-game craze.

Or is it? Actually, Wordle bears a close resemblance to Lingo, a British game show that originally aired briefly on ITV in 1988. The main difference is that on the Lingo program, contestants were given an opening hint, whereas Wordle players are completely on their own.

I recall having played Lingo about a year ago, after a co-worker discovered it. Being a word guy, I was pretty good at it and thought it was a fun game, and then quickly forgot about it. So Wordle isn’t the first game of its kind. Nor is it even the second.

Just ask Steven Cravotta, who created the app Wordle! (with an exclamation point) five years ago when he was a teenager. When downloads of the app, which gives users 12 seconds to make a word from four scrambled letters, recently skyrocketed from 10 a day to 40,000, Cravotta checked the internet to find out what was going on, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It turned out that people were downloading his app thinking it was the hot new game everyone’s rushing to play. (Wordle is free to play its one game a day and doesn’t have an app.) So far Cravotta has made a few thousand dollars from these mistaken downloads. He says he isn’t bothered by the coincidence of the games’ names and that he plans to donate his little windfall to charity.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.