Heatword (Zalize)

Heatword belongs to the family of hot-and-cold word games started by Semantle and Contexto. There is one secret word a day, and you can type any English word as a guess. Instead of letter colours, each guess comes back with a rank: how close it sits in meaning to the secret word, with #1 being the word itself. The lower the rank, the hotter you are, and the trail of guesses sorted by rank shows which way to go.

Guesses are unlimited. If you are stuck you can take a free starter word that sits around rank 300, and after a run of cold guesses the game offers a hint word much closer to the answer. A commentator chimes in every ten guesses with a remark on how warm you are. When you solve it you see your place among the day's solvers and the site-wide median number of guesses.

The word is new every day at midnight UTC and numbered (#95 on 4 October 2026), so everyone plays the same puzzle and can share results without spoilers. Sundays are Geo Day: instead of a word you guess a country, and each guess tells you how many kilometres away it is; your streak is never at risk that day. Past puzzles can be replayed from an archive without touching today's streak, and progress can be moved between devices with a sync code, no account needed. The game is part of Zalize Daily Games and plays in the browser in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese.