Cemantle

Cemantle is the English edition of Cémantix, a word game by the French developer known as enigmatix, inspired by David Turner's Semantle. Each day there is one secret word, and the only clue you get is how close your guesses are to it in meaning. Closeness is measured from a model trained on billions of words of text, so a guess can score warm because it shows up in the same kind of sentence, not only because it means the same thing. An opposite can be close.

Every guess gets a temperature in degrees Celsius, from icy negative numbers up to 100 for the answer itself. Once a guess lands among the thousand words nearest the secret, a per-mille score from 1 to 1000 appears with a progress bar, which tells you how near the top you are. The secret is a common word: a singular noun, an adjective, an adverb or a verb in its plain form. Proper nouns are generally not accepted.

A day usually takes dozens of guesses rather than six, so it suits players who like to wander through a vocabulary and narrow in slowly. When you find the word, the game tells you how many players found it before you that day, and you can see the list of words nearest to it. The puzzle is numbered by day, yesterday's word is shown on the page, and a history panel and a collaborate mode let you look back or play with friends. The site carries ads and costs nothing.