About Wordspool
The daily word association puzzle
Wordspool is a free daily word association puzzle played in a browser. You are given a word to start on and a word to reach. The words gathered around you are the ones related to the word you are standing on; step onto one of those and the pool is replaced by the words related to that one instead. The puzzle is to walk from the start to the goal through those relationships, in as few moves as you can.
Fish → Ocean → Beach → Sun → Planet
How a turn works
- Read the goal word at the top of the screen. It is there from the first second and it never moves.
- Look at the pool of words around the word you are standing on. Every one of them is related to it in some way: it is a kind of it, a part of it, something it is used for, somewhere it is found.
- Choose one and move to it. The pool changes to the words related to your new word.
- Arrive on the goal. There is nothing to type and nothing to spell.
Moves and par
Par is the shortest route from your start to the goal, worked out the moment the puzzle is dealt. Moves is what you have actually spent. Arriving on par means the board could not have been walked in fewer, which is a stronger claim than it sounds: the route is worked out over the whole board, so par is a fact about the puzzle rather than a target somebody picked. Hint says how many steps still lie between you and the goal, and nothing else.
A new pool every day
A hundred words are cut out of the word graph every day at 05:00 UTC, and that pool is the whole board until the next one. The daily challenge is one puzzle from it, the same for everybody: the longest ordinary journey the board offers, which is the one worth everybody having a go at. New puzzle deals a different start and goal from the same hundred words.
Every puzzle has a four-digit code naming its start and its goal, so a code handed to a friend is the same puzzle in their hands. A code only means something during the day it was cut in: the same four digits name a pair of places in one particular hundred words, and tomorrow’s hundred are different words.
What kind of game this is
An association game, not a spelling game. There are no letters to guess, no grid and no anagrams, so it is not the puzzle that Wordle, Spelling Bee or Scrabble are. Those turn on how a word is spelled, and Wordspool never once asks.
It belongs with the games that measure meaning: Semantle, Contexto, NYT Connections, Redactle, Six Degrees of Wikipedia. The difference is that here the distance is walked rather than guessed at. Semantle and Contexto tell you how warm a guess was and leave you to work out why; Wordspool shows you the links themselves and asks which one to take. Every move is a real edge between two words, par is a real shortest path, and the score is how many edges you spent.
Where the words come from
Two open datasets, and the game would not exist without either of them.
- Open English WordNet supplies the taxonomy: what a thing is a kind of, and what it is part of. Licensed CC BY 4.0, and derived in turn from Princeton WordNet.
- ConceptNet 5 supplies the common sense: what a thing is used for, where it is found, what it is made of. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Both are modified on the way in: senses pinned, links scored and filtered, wordings rewritten to read on a screen. What comes out is a graph of 10,352 words joined by 64,359 links. Phrases are dropped, because a board of phrases reads as a list rather than as a place. So are a few hundred words culled for taste rather than for any measurable reason: the game is meant to be a pleasant twenty seconds, and a pool that keeps handing you illness and funerals is not.
A word in Wordspool is just a word. There are no senses and no definitions attached to it, which is deliberate: bank is one word, and meeting it beside both river and money teaches you something true about the word rather than something false about one sense of it.
Because the boards are built from ConceptNet they are an adaptation of it, so the level data is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0 in turn. Neither project endorses this game.
How a board is chosen
A hundred words taken at random out of a graph that size gives you a board that cannot be walked: a handful of hubs, a crowd of leaves hanging off them, and no route between any two things you would want to connect. So the cut is grown rather than sampled, out from a seed word, taking in the neighbourhoods that hold together, and then audited for dead ends, one-way links, and clusters that can be cut off from the rest. A board that fails that audit is not shipped.
The daily pair is the longest journey between two ordinary words on that board. The plain longest journey is the wrong answer, and not by luck: the far corner of a graph of English is its most isolated neighbourhood, which is reliably grief or injury. So common words only, a short list barred from headlining, and a total order underneath: longest, then most ordinary, then alphabetical, so that every machine reading the same board picks the same puzzle.
The leaderboard
Optional, weekly, and reset every Monday at 05:00 UTC. Finishing a puzzle scores against par, and the week’s points are the sum. You can put a first name and one initial on the board if you want to be findable, or leave the number the game gave your browser and stay anonymous. Nothing on the site asks for an email address, an account or a password. The privacy note says exactly what is kept and what is not.
Questions
What is Wordspool?
A free daily word association puzzle played in a browser. You are given a word to start on and a word to reach, and the words around you are the ones related to the word you are standing on. Step onto one and the pool changes to the words related to that one instead. The puzzle is to get from the start to the goal in as few moves as you can.
How do you play Wordspool?
Read the goal word at the top of the screen. Look at the pool of words around the word you are standing on: every one of them is related to it. Choose one and move to it, and the pool changes to the words related to your new word. Keep going until you arrive on the goal. There is nothing to type and nothing to spell.
What is par in Wordspool?
Par is the shortest route from your starting word to the goal, worked out the moment the puzzle is dealt. Arriving on par means the board could not have been walked in fewer moves. Moves is what you actually spent, and hint says how many steps still lie between you and the goal.
Is Wordspool like Wordle?
No. Wordle is a spelling game: you guess letters and the grid tells you which of them are in the right place. Wordspool has no letters to guess, no grid and no anagrams. It is an association game, where the only thing that matters is what words mean and how they are connected to each other.
What games are similar to Wordspool?
Wordspool belongs with the games that measure meaning rather than letters: Semantle, Contexto, NYT Connections, Redactle and Six Degrees of Wikipedia. The difference is that in Wordspool the distance is walked rather than guessed at. Every move is a real, named link between two words, and your score is how many of those links you took.
How does Wordspool decide which words are related?
From two open datasets. Open English WordNet supplies the taxonomy: what a thing is a kind of, and what it is part of. ConceptNet 5 supplies the common sense: what a thing is used for, where it is found, what it is made of. Those are combined, scored and filtered into a graph of 10,352 words joined by 64,359 links, and a hundred of those words are cut out of it to make each day’s board.
How often does the Wordspool puzzle change?
A new pool of a hundred words is cut every day at 05:00 UTC. The daily challenge is one puzzle from that pool, the same for everybody, and new puzzle deals a different start and goal from the same hundred words.
What is a Wordspool code?
Every puzzle has a four-digit code naming its start word and its goal. Share the code and a friend plays the same puzzle. A code only means something during the day it was cut in, because the same four digits name a pair of places in one particular hundred words, and tomorrow’s hundred are different words.
Is Wordspool free to play?
Yes. Wordspool is free in any desktop or mobile browser, with no download, no account and no sign-up. There is a weekly leaderboard you can put a first name on if you want to, and nothing on the site asks for anything more than that.
Who makes Wordspool?
Wordspool is made by Coubrough Games, an independent studio. Questions go to admin@wordspool.app.
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