Word Ladder (wordladder.com)

About Word Ladder (wordladder.com)

Word Ladder is a daily take on the puzzle Lewis Carroll invented in 1877 and called Doublets. You get a start word and an end word of the same length and climb from one to the other by changing a single letter at a time. You cannot add or remove letters, and every word along the way has to be a real English word. The site's own example turns COLD into WARM by way of CORD, WORD and WORM.

Each day has one puzzle number and three ladders. On 2 October 2026, number 640, the easy ladder ran from JUST to LOST, the medium one from START to STONE and the hard one from SISTER to WONDER. The longer the words, the fewer neighbours each one has, so the hard ladder asks for more planning.

You type each rung on the on-screen keyboard and can undo a step at any time. An archive calendar lets you go back and play any earlier day, marking the ones you have solved or left in progress, and a statistics page keeps your record in the browser. The About page covers the puzzle's history and variants.

The game is free, needs no account and is available in English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. It comes from Ana Puzzle, which also runs other small daily puzzles linked at the foot of the page.

How to play Word Ladder (wordladder.com)

1. Open Word Ladder and choose Easy, Medium or Hard.
2. Read the start word and the end word for the day's ladder.
3. Type a new word that differs from the previous one by a single changed letter.
4. Keep adding rungs, each a real English word, until you reach the end word.
5. Try to finish in as few steps as possible, then play the other two levels or the archive.

Tips

• Work from both ends: think about which words lie one letter away from the end word.
• Vowel changes often open up more options than consonant changes.
• On the hard ladder, look for common endings such as ER or ED that stay fixed while you change the front.
• If you hit a dead end, undo two or three rungs rather than one.

Questions