Word Guess

How to play

Tap a letter, or type one. A letter that is in the word fills in every place it appears.

A wrong letter drains one segment of the beacon. When the last segment goes, the round is over and the word is revealed.

Trying a letter you have already tried costs nothing.

Rules and controls — Zerdly's preset

• You guess letters, not words. There is no whole-word guess, so a life is never spent on a stab at the answer.
• A correct letter reveals every place it appears, not just the first.
• A wrong letter costs one segment of signal. A repeated letter costs nothing and is refused rather than counted.
• The miss limit is different in every preset — six in Quick Play, Category Play and the Daily, eight in Kids words, four in Hard.
• You win when every letter is showing. You lose when the beacon is empty, and the word is then revealed.
• Upper case, lower case and accented keys are all treated the same, so an É counts as an E.

Presets

• Quick Play — Everyday words, four to eight letters, six misses. No category to lean on — the letters are all you get.
• Category Play — Words drawn from twelve hand-picked sets, so the answer belongs to something. You can spend score to be told which set — a move Quick Play does not have.
• Kids words — Short words from the same hand-picked sets, with the category showing from the start and eight misses to spend. Nothing here comes from the big dictionary.
• Hard — A deeper pool of less common words, five to eleven letters, and only four misses. This one is a difficulty and says so.
• Daily Word — One word a day, the same for everybody, built from the date. Your local history is deliberately ignored so it stays the same everywhere.

The category sets

Category Play and Kids words draw from these twelve hand-picked lists. Every word in them was checked against the dictionary before it shipped, and no word appears in two sets — otherwise the category hint could not be true.

Animals · Food and drink · Colours · Weather · The body · At school · Around the house · Music · Sport · Nature · Getting around · Clothes

Tips

• Start with vowels. Most words have at least one, and a vowel that lands often opens two squares at once.
• Then try the common consonants — R, S, T, N, L. They cost the same as a wild guess and pay off far more often.
• Look at the gaps rather than the letters. A word with two blanks between an E and a D is a much smaller set than it feels.
• In Category Play, buying the category early is usually better value than buying a letter — it narrows every remaining guess rather than filling one square.
• Never worry about repeating a letter. It costs nothing, so if you are unsure, press it.

Where the words come from

The general answers come from ENABLE, a public-domain word list built for word games, ranked for commonness against a freely licensed frequency list and filtered through an openly licensed profanity blocklist. Nothing was purchased and nothing was scraped.

The category and kids answers are 357 words chosen by hand for this route. The full record, including what the ranking does and does not guarantee, ships in the repository.

Privacy and local play

Everything runs in your browser. Your current word, your settings, your best scores and the list of words you have seen recently are kept on this device only, and the button under the board clears them without touching any other Zerdly tool. No account, no sign-in, and nothing about your play leaves the machine you are on.

Questions

Does guessing the same letter twice cost me anything?

No, nothing at all. A letter you have already tried is switched off on the keyboard, and if you press the key anyway the game tells you and moves on. There is never a reason to hesitate over whether you have already tried something — if the key is still lit, you have not.

Can I guess the whole word?

No. This game is letters only, and that is a deliberate choice rather than something missing. The miss limit is the whole tension of the game, and a whole-word guess would make it mean something different — you could spend a life on a wild stab at the answer instead of on a letter.

What happens when a letter appears more than once?

Every instance appears at once. Guess E on BETTER and both Es fill in together; guess A on BANANA and you get all three. That is the rule the game is built around, and it is why one good guess can change a round completely.

How many wrong letters can I afford?

It depends on the preset, and the beacon above the word shows you: it starts fully charged and each wrong letter drains one segment. Quick Play, Category Play and the Daily give you six, Kids words gives eight, and Hard gives four.

What do the hints do, and what do they cost?

There are two. Reveal a letter fills in the next letter you have not found, working left to right, and costs 15 points — you always know which letter you are buying before you buy it. Show the category tells you which of the twelve hand-picked sets the word came from, and costs 10 points. There are no definition clues.

Why can I not use the category hint in Quick Play?

Because there is no category to show. Quick Play, Hard and the Daily draw from a general dictionary of ordinary English words, and those words do not belong to a set. Category Play and Kids words draw from twelve hand-picked lists, so there the question has an answer. The button says so rather than pretending.

How is the score worked out?

A word you get is worth 10 points for each letter, plus 5 for each segment of signal you had left, less whatever you spent on hints. A word you miss is worth nothing. Each preset keeps its own best, because a Kids score and a Hard score are not the same measurement.

Where do the words come from?

Quick Play, Hard and the Daily use ENABLE, a public-domain word list built for word games, ranked by how common each word is in real writing so the answers stay fair rather than obscure. The commonest few hundred words in English are function words — the, of, with — and none of them makes a satisfying answer, so they are removed by name. Nothing here was purchased or scraped.

Is the kids list really different, or just shorter words?

Really different. It is 357 words chosen by hand across twelve sets, and nothing in it comes from the big dictionary at all. That matters: the commonest few thousand English words include a good many a children's word game should not serve, and a profanity filter does not touch one of them. Filtering cannot produce a safe list — only choosing can.

Will I see the same word twice?

Not soon. The game remembers the last 200 answers on this device and skips them. The one exception is the Daily, which deliberately ignores your history — it has to be the same word for everybody on a given date, so it cannot take your past play into account.

How does the Daily work?

One word a day, the same for everybody, built from the UTC date rather than your local one — so it changes at the same moment everywhere. It is regenerated from the date rather than stored, which is why the dictionary version is part of the key.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. The word list, the game and your progress all run in your browser. There is no account, and clearing this game's data leaves every other Zerdly tool untouched.

Related interactives

• Word Scramble — the same dictionary, with the letters in front of you.
• Word Search — find the words hidden in the grid.
• Crossword — clues, squares and a grid that checks itself.
• Codebreaker — deduction against a hidden answer, without the letters.