Word Sense: a daily word game where the clues are the score

Word Sense is a daily word game where you name a word from a sentence it has been cut out of, and ask for clues when you need them. Three words a day, five clues each. The interesting part of the design is that the clues are not a safety net bolted on the side. They are the score.

What a turn looks like

A sentence arrives with a hole in it:

She was _____ to agree without seeing the contract.

Type the word and the word is settled. Or ask for a clue, and the first rung of the ladder opens. Ask again and the second opens. There are five rungs per word, and when they are gone they are gone.

Three words a day, dealt one from each difficulty tier and played in order: easy for everyday words, then medium for less frequent words and slang, then hard. The order is strict, and the next word opens on its own first action rather than automatically, so you can stop after one.

The clue ladder

Six kinds of clue exist. Each word uses five of them, always in the same order, and never in a different order for different players. Two people who buy the fifth clue on the same word see the same clue.

1. An opposite. The cheapest and the most useful, which is why it is first.
2. A synonym. Something close in meaning.
3. The length. How many letters.
4. A second sentence the same word fits.
5. The first letter.
6. The meaning. The definition, which all but hands it to you.

The five-of-six rule falls out of the English language rather than a design meeting. Plenty of words have no clean opposite. So a word with an opposite starts there and ends on its first letter, never spending its meaning at all. A word without one shifts every rung up and ends on its meaning. Both ladders are five rungs, and both end on a clue that is nearly the answer.

A wrong guess costs a clue

This is the rule that makes the game a game, and it is worth spelling out because it is unusual.

A wrong guess costs exactly what asking for a clue would have cost. Not less. There is no free swing, no “let me just try something” that leaves you no worse off. Guessing is a way of buying information with the same currency as asking, and both are priced the same.

Without that rule the optimal strategy is to type words at random until one lands, and the clue ladder becomes decoration. With it, every input is a decision: do I know enough, or do I buy the next rung.

A wrong guess with the ladder already spent ends the word. You can also give a word up, which settles it unnamed at the cost of the clues it had already spent. Every word closes on an answer card carrying its meaning, its synonyms and its opposite, whether you named it or not.

Why time is not in the score

Word Sense ranks on the words you solved, weighted by tier, with hard outranking easy and medium put together. The tiebreaker is unspent clues. Time is deliberately absent, and equal runs are separated by who submitted first.

Putting a clock on this particular game would have quietly changed it into a different one. The pleasure in a word puzzle is turning it over, trying a sound out, rejecting it. A timer punishes exactly that and rewards typing fast, which is not the skill the game is about. Sudoku has a clock because a Sudoku is a race against your own method. Word Sense does not, because it is not.

A leaderboard row reads like 2/3 (E, M): two of three words, the easy and the medium ones, the hard one missed.

Where the words come from

The lexicon is held in the repository and carries, for every entry, its meaning, its synonyms, any antonym, and sentences with the word cut out. The generator deals three entries a day and spends two of an entry’s sentences: one on the prompt, one on the extra-sentence clue.

There are 320 words today: 102 easy, 102 medium and 116 hard. The September 2026 expansion added 92 words per tier, which is roughly another three months at three words a day. Draws are random, so individual words can repeat.

The lexicon has its own test suite, and it is the automatic validator the product requires of every game. It fails the build if a sentence leaks its own answer, if a sentence gives away a clue the ladder is still holding back, if two entries share a meaning, or if any entry cannot fill a five-rung ladder. It also enforces the minimum pool size per tier, so the vocabulary cannot quietly shrink.

Every input costs the same, whether it is a guess or a question. That is the entire game.

What Word Sense is not

• It is Daily only. There is no More puzzles mode. Sudoku, Recall and Vanish have one; Word Sense does not, and three words is the whole of it each day.
• It is not a vocabulary course. It is wordplay, and it promises nothing about your language ability. A result in it measures how a run of three words went, and nothing else.
• It is not Wordle. Nothing is spelled out letter by letter and there is no green and yellow feedback. You are reading a sentence and naming what belongs in the gap.
• It is English only, and the variant policy is still an open question.

If you want the rest of the collection, Word Sense sits alongside three games with no words in them at all, which are described in our guide to daily games with no words.

Questions people ask

How does Word Sense work?

A sentence appears with one word cut out. Type the word or spend a clue. Five clues per word, three words a day, one easy, one medium and one hard, in that order.

What are the clues?

An opposite, a synonym, the length, a second sentence, the first letter and the meaning. Each word uses five of those six.

Does a wrong guess cost anything?

Yes, exactly one clue, the same as asking. A wrong guess with no clues left ends the word.

How is Word Sense scored?

Solved words weighted by tier, then unspent clues. Time is not part of it.

Can I play more than three words a day?

No. Word Sense is Daily only and has no More puzzles mode.