GRAMMY

GRAMMY is one of the daily puzzles on Take5Games, a small site of word, pattern, geography and chess dailies made by J Krishnamurthi. Its game code still carries the older name BIGRAM, and the home page lists it as "pair anagrams".

Each day the page deals the same tiles to every player. Seven of them are locked letter pairs such as TH or ER, and four are single letters. Above them sits a bar of ten slots. A few of the slots are marked x2 or x3, and the last three slots form the "finish zone" where a word of 8, 9 or 10 letters has to end. You tap tiles to fill the bar from left to right. A pair always fills two slots in its own order, so the puzzle is as much about where the pairs can sit as about which word you are looking for.

Every letter has a value, from 1 for common vowels up to 8 for J and higher for the rarest letters. Your score is each letter's value times its slot's multiplier. The game works out the score of the best common word that fits the day's tiles and shows it as the gold target. Reaching it earns gold, and two lower tiers give silver and bronze. You can give up to see the best word, but then the day is over.

The puzzle is generated in the browser from the date, starting from a seed word drawn from a list of about 9,200 long words. Puzzles are numbered by the day of the year, so 8 November 2026 was #312. A medal tally, a gold streak, a timer and a share button sit around the board, and nothing needs an account.

The locked pairs make it harder than a plain anagram. A likely word can fail because one of its pairs would have to split, so Scrabble players often find their first idea does not fit.