how to play
How to play Guess the Word
Every day, one secret word is picked for everyone. Your goal: find it by guessing other words, guided by a score that tells you how close each guess is in meaning.
Make a guess
Type an English word and press enter. It can be a noun, a verb, an adjective: the game knows about 68,000 words. Words it doesn't know (typos, very rare words) are simply turned down and don't count as a guess. Plurals and other inflected forms count as their base form: “cats” is scored as “cat”, “walked” as “walk”.
Read the score
Each guess gets a closeness score from 0 to 100. It doesn't care about spelling or letters in common, only about meaning: two words used in the same contexts score high. The secret word itself scores 100.
- Above 60: you're very close, same family of ideas.
- 40 to 60: right topic, keep narrowing it down.
- 20 to 40: there's a distant link.
- Below 20: freezing, try another direction.
Next to the score, a gauge shows where your guess ranks among the 1,000 words closest to the secret word: “57th closest” means only 56 words are closer. The fuller the gauge, the warmer you are; it stays empty for words outside the 1,000 closest.
Your three best words stay on the podium; the others are sorted from closest to furthest, so you can see at a glance which direction pays off.
An example
Say the secret word is lantern. A random first guess like “car” scores low. “Night” does better: there's a link with darkness. “Light” jumps up, and so does “lamp”. Digging in that direction, “torch” or “candle” get closer still, until you land on the word. Going from the general topic to the exact word is the key to the game.
Find the word
When you find it, the screen turns green and shows how many guesses you needed, how you placed among today's players and, if you're logged in, your streak of consecutive days. The next word arrives at midnight New York time (Eastern Time); a countdown tells you when.
The leaderboard
Pick a username in the profile menu to appear on the leaderboard. Your username comes with a tag (name#1234) that makes your account unique: write it down, it lets you get your account back on another device. The leaderboard counts the total number of words found and the current streak.
Multiplayer
In multi, you hunt for another secret word at the same time as other players, live. There are two ways to play: a quick game, which puts you with random players, and a private room, whose code you send to your friends. In race mode, everyone searches on their own and sees the others' progress; in co-op, everyone shares their guesses in a common feed.
A few tips
- Start broad: very general words (“nature”, “object”, “feeling”, “job”) quickly place the topic.
- A middling score on a verb can hide a close noun: try the word family (“bake” → “bakery”).
- The model learned from real text: think of the words you'd find next to the secret word in a sentence, not just its synonyms.
- The secret word is always a common word, picked from the 10,000 most frequent in English.