Semantle

About Semantle

Semantle was made by David Turner, a developer in New York, in January 2022, while Wordle was at its peak. He wanted a daily word game that was harder and less boxed in than guessing five letters, and built it on Word2vec, a Google technique for word meaning that places each word as a point in a space where related words sit close together. The game is now part of The Word Finder, and versions exist in other languages, including Spanish and German on the same site.

You type any word and the game shows a similarity score, where 100 means you found the secret word and unrelated words land near zero or below. If your guess is among the thousand words nearest the answer, it also gets a rank out of 1000, which tells you that you are on the right track even when the score looks low. At the start the game tells you how similar the nearest, tenth nearest and thousandth nearest words are, so you know what a good score looks like that day.

The difficulty is the point. Because the model learned from news text, its idea of closeness can be odd: a word's opposite often scores high, and words that appear in the same kind of sentence count as neighbours even if they mean different things. A common approach is to throw out a spread of everyday words, such as an animal, a food, a place and a verb, and then follow whichever scores best. If you get stuck, you can ask for a hint, which gives you a word slightly closer than your best guess, or give up and see the answer.

Semantle suits patient players who like word association and do not mind a long session. For a gentler start there is Semantle Junior, and the archive lets you play earlier puzzles. Teams let friends work on the same word together.

How to play Semantle

1. Type any English word and submit it as a guess.
2. Read its similarity score: higher means closer in meaning to the secret word, and 100 means you found it.
3. Watch for a rank out of 1000, which appears when your guess is among the thousand closest words.
4. Use your best-scoring guesses to choose related words and close in on the answer.
5. Ask for a hint or give up if you are stuck; otherwise keep guessing, as there is no limit.

Tips

• Open with a handful of unrelated common words, such as a person, a food, a building, a feeling and an action, to find the general area.
• Compare your scores with the nearest-word scores shown at the start; a guess near the thousandth nearest score is already in range.
• Try opposites and words used in the same contexts, not just synonyms; the model often ranks them close.
• Change the part of speech: if a noun scores well, try the related verb or adjective.
• Sort your guesses by similarity and keep working from the top few rather than the latest one.

Questions