Cémantix

About Cémantix

Cémantix is a French word game, credited on the page to enigmatix and inspired by Semantle by David Turner. The goal is to find a secret word by moving closer to it in meaning rather than in spelling. The page counts the days with a puzzle number and shows yesterday's word.

Every word you try gets a temperature in degrees. Some values are given as landmarks in the legend, from icy to burning. If your word is among the 1000 nearest to the answer, a progress score from 1 to 1000 per mille appears too. Closeness is measured from a body of more than a billion words of text, so two words count as near when they are used in similar contexts, which means an adjective and its opposite can sit close together. To keep things manageable, you are looking for a singular noun or a masculine singular adjective. Accents count, capitals do not, and proper names are generally refused.

The rules warn that you will need far more than six tries, likely dozens. At the end, the ranking you see is your place among the day's solvers, not a count of your guesses. You can reveal the closest words, give up and see the answer, and look back at your history. A team code lets several people work on the same day's word together.

Cémantix suits players who like word association and do not mind a longer session. Its sister game Pédantix, on the same site, applies the same measure of closeness to a hidden Wikipedia page.

How to play Cémantix

1. Type a French word, a singular noun or a masculine singular adjective, and submit it.
2. Read its temperature: the higher, the closer in meaning to the secret word.
3. Watch for a score out of 1000, which means the word is among the thousand nearest.
4. Use your warmest words to choose new guesses around the same idea.
5. Keep going until you find the word, then share your result or see the nearest words.

Tips

• Start with very different everyday words to find which area of meaning gets warm.
• Opposites and related words can score high, so a warm adjective may point to its contrary.
• Drop plurals and conjugated verbs: the game wants base forms.
• Once you see a score per mille, try more specific words from the same field.

Questions