How to Play CloseWord

Find the secret word by meaning, not by spelling. Every guess tells you how close you are — and you have unlimited tries.

The basics

1. Type any English word and submit it.
2. Each guess gets a rank showing how semantically close it is to the secret word. The rank is its position in a similarity list computed from word embeddings.
3. Lower is closer. Rank 1 means you found the word. Rank 50 is very close; rank 1000+ is far away.

For example, if the secret word is ocean:

Reading the colors

• Green — very close (rank 100 or better). You're in the right neighborhood.
• Yellow — getting warm (rank up to 500). The topic is related.
• Gray / brown — far away. Consider switching topics entirely.

If you use High Contrast mode in Settings, green becomes blue and yellow becomes orange.

Hints

You have 3 hints per game. Each hint reveals a real word together with its rank. Choose the hint style in Settings:

• Easy — a word roughly halfway between your best guess and the answer.
• Medium — a word just slightly closer than your current best.
• Hard — a word at an unpredictable rank. Riskier, but it can break you out of a rut.

Game modes

• Daily — one shared puzzle per day, the same for everyone. Solve it and share your result.
• Practice — a new random word whenever you like, with a shareable link so a friend can try the same word.
• Challenge — pick any word yourself and send a friend the link to guess it.

Tips from experienced players

• Start broad. Probe different categories — animals, places, emotions, objects — to find the right semantic neighborhood.
• Once a guess turns warm, explore its synonyms and related concepts. Ranks drop sharply as you close in.
• Stuck above rank 1000? Abandon that branch and try a completely different topic.
• Plurals, tenses, and spelling variants rank almost identically — don't waste energy on "cats" after "cat".
• Use the sort toggle to see your closest words at the top, or review your guesses in order.
• Save hints for genuine dead ends, not for the opening moves.

FAQ