How to play and read the numbers

What you are guessing

One word is set each day. The game never tells you the word. When you type a word, it only returns a number for how close that word is to the answer.

Use the numbers to steer toward the answer. You win when you find it, and your guess count is your score.

Where the similarity comes from

Each word has a vector of 300 numbers, and the game measures the cosine between two vectors. The vectors are fastText data learned from how words are used together in web pages and Wikipedia.

So the number reflects how words appear together in text, not a dictionary definition. Opposites can score high, and near synonyms can score low.

The screen shows the cosine times 100 with two decimals. The answer itself is 100.00.

What the rank means

Rank only appears for words in the nearest 1,000 out of 50,000. Rank 1 is the word closest to the answer.

Outside that, the game says outside the top 1,000. The first, 10th and 1,000th values on the start screen are that day's yardstick. Beat them and you are getting warm.

Your first few guesses

Go wide. Try words from different areas such as a person, a thing, a place, an action. The closer area shows up fast.

Once a number climbs or a rank appears, try words that are used alongside that word.

Hints and giving up

A hint gives one word a step closer than your best guess so far. Using it puts an assisted mark on the rank board.

Giving up shows the answer. The 100 nearest words appear on the past answers pages from the next day. Today's list is never opened early.

Where the words come from

Answer candidates come from Wiktionary frequency lists. Names, countries, religion and rough words are filtered out. The criteria are on the sources page.