The Proximity Word Game
Guess the secret word. Every guess comes back with its proximity: how close its meaning is, as a rank.
Guess the secret word. Closer guesses get a lower number.
Close in meaning, not in spelling
In most word games, close means sharing letters. In a proximity game it means sharing meaning. Type any word and you get its position in a list of 70,000 words, sorted by how near each one is to today’s answer. Rank 1 is the answer. A rank under 100 means you are in its immediate neighbourhood; a rank in the tens of thousands means you are in the wrong part of the language entirely.
Spelling tells you nothing. A word with five letters in common can rank near the bottom, and a word with none can be in the top ten.
How proximity is measured
Each word in the list is represented by a vector: 300 numbers learned from how the word is used across a very large body of web text. Words that turn up in similar contexts end up with similar vectors. The proximity of your guess is the cosine similarity between its vector and the answer’s, and the ranking is every word in the list sorted by that number.
The whole list is worked out once per puzzle, before the day starts, which is why a guess comes back instantly and why everyone playing the same puzzle sees the same ranks.
Two consequences worth knowing. Opposites are often close, because hot and cold appear in the same sentences. And a word can rank high through a sense you were not thinking of, so when a guess scores surprisingly well, ask what else it can mean.
Proximity on a real puzzle
Puzzle #1’s answer was workspace, and it has been public since launch. These were some of the closest words to it:
- workstation: rank 2
- coworking: rank 5
- kitchen: rank 25
- jobsite: rank 100
- minimalism: rank 400
Even rank 400 is a word you can see the connection to, out of 70,000. Finding the right region is quick; the skill is choosing between the few hundred plausible words inside it. See the full top 500 for that puzzle.
Getting closer, faster
- Start broad. An everyday noun tells you which half of the language you are in. Our best starting words are measured against real puzzles.
- Move along the best word, not around it. When a guess jumps up the ranks, try words used in the same sentences as it before trying synonyms.
- Abandon cold regions. Three guesses in the thousands from the same topic means the topic is wrong.
- Stuck? A hint reveals a word closer than your best guess, and once you are very close it starts revealing letters.
Want more rounds than one a day? Play unlimited, or read how this compares with Semantle and the hot and cold word game.
Keep reading
Frequently asked
- What is a proximity game?
- A word game where you guess a hidden word and each guess is scored by how close it is in meaning, not by which letters it shares. Here the score is a rank: 1 is the answer, 2 is the closest word to it, and so on down a list of about 70,000 words.
- How is proximity measured?
- Every word in the list has a vector learned from how it is used in billions of words of web text. Proximity is the angle between your word's vector and the answer's (cosine similarity). Words used in similar contexts point in similar directions, so they rank close.
- Why do some close words feel wrong?
- Because the model learned from usage, not from a dictionary. Opposites often rank close (hot and cold appear in the same sentences), and a word can rank high because of a sense of it you were not thinking of.
- Is it the same as Contexto or Semantle?
- Same family, different scoring. Semantle shows a raw similarity score; this game, like contexto.me, turns it into a rank, which is easier to read at a glance. The puzzles here are our own and differ from contexto.me's.
- Is it free?
- Yes. One new puzzle every day and unlimited practice games, with no sign-up, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.