Contexto – Daily Semantic Word Guessing Game

How to play

Type any English word and press Enter. The game compares that word with the hidden answer and returns its position in a ranked list of 38,437 words. Keep guessing, watch which words score lower numbers, and follow that trail until you land on #1.

1. Enter a word — spelling accuracy matters, spelling similarity does not.
2. Read the rank. Lower is closer.
3. Guess words related in meaning to your best result so far.
4. Use a hint if the trail goes cold, or give up to see the answer.

The full rules page walks through worked examples of a round.

How Contexto ranks your guesses

Each word in the vocabulary has a numeric fingerprint learned from how the word is used across a large body of English text. Words that appear in similar contexts end up with similar fingerprints. The game measures the distance between your guess and the secret word, sorts every word by that distance, and hands you the position.

• #1Solved
• #2–10Extremely close
• #11–100Very close
• #101–500Close
• #501–1,500Getting warmer
• #1,501 and aboveFar away

Colour is never the only signal: every guess shows its exact number and a written label, and each result is announced to screen readers as it arrives.

What makes semantic word games different

Letter puzzles reward pattern matching — you narrow an alphabet down to a shape. A meaning-based puzzle rewards association. You are not eliminating letters; you are moving across a map of concepts, and each rank tells you whether you walked towards the answer or away from it.

That changes what a “good guess” looks like. A word that scores #4,000 is not wasted: it fences off a region of the language. Two mediocre guesses in different directions often locate the answer faster than ten guesses circling the same idea.

Best way to start a game

Open with a broad, common noun that sits in the middle of everyday language — something like water, time, house or music. Broad words tend to return a usable number instead of the flat 20,000-plus you get from rare vocabulary, and that first number tells you which half of the language to search.

Then move deliberately: a concrete noun, an abstract noun, a verb, a place. Once one direction clearly beats the others, work inwards with synonyms and close relatives. There is more of this on the strategy page, including how to read the gap between two ranks.

Daily and unlimited modes

The daily puzzle is the same for everyone and resets at midnight UTC — it is the one worth sharing with friends. Unlimited mode draws from a separate pool of puzzles you can play back to back, with easy, normal and hard difficulty, which makes it the better place to practise.

The two pools never overlap, so an unlimited round can never spoil an upcoming daily answer.

Play previous games

Every past daily puzzle stays playable in the archive, grouped by month with its number, date and difficulty. Answers stay hidden behind a deliberate reveal, so you can work through old puzzles properly.