Semantle

Semantle is a daily word puzzle where you find a single hidden secret word by meaning, not spelling. Each guess returns a similarity score based on how related your word is to the answer, so you close in by thinking about concepts rather than letters. You get unlimited guesses, and there is one new word every day.

What is Semantle?

Semantle is a daily word game built around meaning instead of spelling. There is one hidden secret word per day, and your job is to find it by guessing other words and watching how semantically close each one lands. Instead of telling you which letters are right, the game reports a similarity number derived from how the words relate in everyday usage, so a guess like "ocean" might score well when the answer is "tide" even though the two share almost no letters.

What sets Semantle apart from Wordle and the many letter-based clones is that there is no five-letter grid and no green-or-yellow feedback. Progress is purely conceptual: you chase rising similarity values by reasoning about topics, synonyms, and the situations where words appear together. Because the scoring leans on context rather than shape, the game rewards lateral thinking and broad vocabulary over anagram skill, which is also why it has a reputation for being far harder than most daily puzzles.

Semantle was created by developer David Turner and launched in early 2022, while Wordle was at its peak, as a deliberately tougher and more open-ended take on the daily format. The scoring is powered by word2vec, a neural language model trained on a large Google News text dataset, using cosine similarity to measure how related two words are. A perfect match reads as 100, and once a guess enters the thousand words closest in meaning to the secret answer, the game adds a proximity rank so you can tell you are genuinely circling the target rather than just warm by coincidence. The site also offers a Spanish edition and an easier Semantle Junior, and it is now maintained by The Word Finder.

The vibe is patient and exploratory rather than fast. With unlimited guesses and no clock, a session can run anywhere from a couple of dozen tries for a lucky theme to well over a hundred when the meaning space is broad, and players often share how many guesses a solve took. A fresh word arrives each day at 8 PM New York time, and a full archive lets you play earlier puzzles whenever you like. Semantle suits people who enjoy vocabulary, association, and the slow satisfaction of zeroing in on a concept, and who do not mind a puzzle that openly leans toward difficult.

How to play Semantle

1. Type any word as your guess and submit it.
2. Read the similarity score it returns, which rates how close in meaning your word is to the secret word.
3. If your guess lands among the thousand nearest words, note the proximity rank shown, since that means you are genuinely close.
4. Use your warmest guesses as clues and try words related to them in topic, synonym, or context.
5. Keep refining toward higher scores, branching out from the meanings that scored best.
6. Continue until a guess scores a perfect match and reveals the secret word.

Tips and strategy

• Watch the proximity rank, not just the raw score: entering the top thousand nearest words is a much stronger signal that you are near the answer.
• When a guess scores well, mine its associations: synonyms, the broader theme it belongs to, and the everyday situations where it shows up.
• Test different forms and senses of a promising word, since the model may rate a noun, verb, or adjective version quite differently.
• Open with words from a few unrelated topics to map the meaning space before committing to one direction.
• Treat a low score as real information that rules out a whole region of meaning, and pivot away from it rather than guessing near-duplicates.
• Be patient and methodical: with unlimited guesses, steady concept-by-concept refinement beats random tries.

Good to know

Resets

Daily at 8 PM New York time

Cost

Free to play in a browser

Guesses

Unlimited

Creator

David Turner (2022); now maintained by The Word Finder

Scoring

word2vec similarity on a Google News dataset; 100 means solved

Archive

Full archive of past puzzles is playable

Semantle FAQ

Is Semantle free?

Yes. Semantle is free to play in a web browser at semantle.com, with no purchase required to play the daily puzzle or the archive.

How many guesses do you get in Semantle?

Unlimited. There is no cap on guesses, so you can keep trying words until you find the secret word. Solves commonly take anywhere from a couple dozen to well over a hundred guesses.

When does Semantle reset?

A new secret word is released every day at 8 PM New York time, when the previous puzzle ends and the next one begins.

Is there a Semantle archive?

Yes. You can play the full archive of past Semantle puzzles, including earlier Semantle and Semantle Junior games, at any time.

Is Semantle related to Wordle?

It was inspired by Wordle's daily format but is a different game. Wordle scores letters and position, while Semantle scores how close your guess is in meaning to the secret word using a word2vec model.