Word Ladder

A daily word ladder puzzle

Every day there is one new word ladder here, the same for everyone. You climb from the word at the top to the word at the bottom by changing one letter at a time, and every rung in between has a clue, so it plays like a small crossword. A ladder has two to six rungs. Nothing to sign up for or install, and a ladder you start is saved in this browser.

A new ladder arrives at midnight UTC: early evening in the Americas, and overnight in Europe. Every earlier ladder stays playable in past puzzles.

What is a word ladder?

A word ladder is a word puzzle in which you turn one word into another through a chain of real words, changing a single letter at each step and keeping the letters in the same places. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, invented it at Christmas 1877 and called it doublets. From 1879 he published the puzzles in Vanity Fair, where readers raced to “drive PIG into STY” or “raise FOUR to FIVE” in the fewest steps. Since then the same game has been called word golf, word chains, laddergrams and word ladders.

Word ladder rules

• One letter at a time. Each rung differs from the rung above it, and from the rung below it, by exactly one letter. Letters never move around and are never added or taken away, so a four-letter ladder stays four letters all the way down.
• Real words only. Every rung is an ordinary English word: no names, no abbreviations.
• A clue for every rung. The clue under the ladder describes the word on the rung you are on.
• One right answer. Every ladder here has exactly one shortest route from the top word to the bottom word, checked against every word you might type, so each rung has one answer and nobody wins by finding an odd word the puzzle did not expect.

How to play

Tap a rung (or use the up and down arrow keys), type the word with your keyboard or the keys on the screen, and press Enter or Check. Fill the rungs in any order; a solved rung locks with its changed letter in green.

• Right word: the rung locks and you move on to the next empty one.
• A real word, but not this one: 20 seconds are added to your time, and one letter of the right word is shown.
• Not a word at all: nothing happens. A typo never costs you anything.
• Reveal: shows one letter of the rung you are on for 15 seconds, starting with the letter that changes.

Word ladder examples

Lewis Carroll’s best-known doublet turns COLD into WARM in four steps. The green letter is the one that changed:

• cold
• cord A thin rope
• card You might deal one
• ward A room in a hospital
• warm

Here the clues would be “a thin rope” for CORD, “you might deal one” for CARD and “a room in a hospital” for WARD. Carroll’s PIG into STY takes five steps: PIG, WIG, WAG, WAY, SAY, STY.

Tips for solving a word ladder puzzle

• Work from both ends. A rung touches the word above and the word below. The rungs next to the top and bottom words have the most letters already fixed, so start there and work towards the middle.
• Find the letters that must change. Compare the top and bottom words letter by letter. Every position where they differ has to change somewhere on the ladder, and in the shortest ladder most positions change only once. If the two words differ in three places and the ladder has four steps, one of those letters changes twice on the way, passing through a letter that is in neither word.
• Use both neighbours. Once the rungs above and below a rung are known, only one real word fits between them. If you are stuck on a middle rung, solve its neighbours first.
• Read the clue for its part of speech. “To go up” wants a verb, “a farm animal” wants a noun. The clue often tells you the vowel before it tells you the word.
• Try the vowel. When the consonants are stuck, change the vowel: in COLD to WARM, CORD to CARD is the step that turns the O into the A that WARM needs.
• Reveal costs less than a wrong guess. If you have no idea, Reveal (15 seconds) is cheaper than a wild guess with a real word (20 seconds), and the letter it shows is the one that changes.

Your time, your streak and sharing

The clock starts with your first letter and runs only while the puzzle is on your screen; penalties are added to it. Solve today’s ladder on consecutive days to build a streak. Past puzzles count apart and never break it.

Share gives you one square per rung: green for right first time, yellow after a reveal or a miss, white when fully revealed. It shows no letters, so you can post it before your friends have played.

Clues are adapted from Princeton WordNet 3.0 (Princeton University, “About WordNet,” 2010). The word list was built with wordfreq by Robyn Speer, CC BY-SA 4.0.

More puzzles for a quiet afternoon: Daily Minesweeper, Daily Mahjong and Klondike Solitaire.