Semantle is the game the rest of this category grew out of, and it sits at the difficult end of the semantic and daily word games we cover. It was built by David Turner in early 2022, in the middle of the Wordle boom, as a pointed inversion: where Wordle tells you about letters, Semantle tells you only about meaning, and where Wordle ends after six tries, Semantle will let you guess four hundred times without ever hinting that you are close. If you have played Contexto, Semantle is the same idea with the guardrails removed.
Today’s Semantle answer
We do not republish Semantle’s daily word here, and that is deliberate: Semantle resets at midnight UTC rather than local midnight, so a page claiming to hold “today’s answer” is wrong for most of the world for most of the day.
The game gives it to you directly instead, in two ways:
- Give up. The link sits under the guess box. Semantle reveals the word immediately, along with the top-1000 list around it — which is the genuinely instructive part, and worth reading even on a round you won.
- Wait for the reset. The previous day’s answer is shown on the site once the new puzzle opens.
If you are stuck rather than finished, the strategy below is more use than the answer. And if you want a game that publishes its solution openly, Contexto’s answer page carries today’s word behind a spoiler blur with three progressive hints before it.
What Semantle is
Every day Semantle picks one secret word. You type a guess and the game returns a similarity score — a number between roughly -100 and 100 describing the cosine similarity between your guess and the answer, as measured by a Word2vec model trained on Google News text. A score of 100 means you found it. A score of 30 means the two words are strongly related. A score of 4 means essentially nothing.
The scores are the whole design and the whole problem. Cosine similarity is not intuitive: most ordinary English words score between 0 and 10 against any given target, so the vast majority of your guesses come back as a wall of low single digits with no indication of which direction to move. There is no colour, no grid, no letter feedback and no guess limit. It is you, a number, and a model trained on a decade-old news corpus.
To soften that, Semantle shows a secondary signal once you get warm: if your guess is among the thousand words closest to the answer, the game tells you its rank in that top-1000 list. Crossing from “score 22.1” to “score 22.1, rank 843” is the moment a Semantle round actually begins, and it often takes fifty guesses to get there.
How to play
A round works like this:
- Open a session and type any word — nouns work better than function words, because the model has richer vectors for them.
- Read the similarity score. Anything under 10 is noise; treat it as “not in the right region” rather than “slightly wrong”.
- Once something clears roughly 20, mine that word’s neighbourhood. Guess its synonyms, its category, its typical objects and its opposites — antonyms score high in Word2vec, because opposites appear in near-identical contexts.
- When a guess enters the top 1,000, switch from exploring to converging. The rank number is far more informative than the score, and it behaves much like a Contexto rank.
- Repeat until the score reads 100.
Semantle also ships a “Semantle Junior” mode with a much smaller, more common vocabulary, and a multiplayer variant called Semantle Rooms. The core daily puzzle resets at midnight UTC — not local midnight, which trips up players outside Europe.
How Semantle differs from Contexto
Both games measure meaning, but they report it differently, and that difference changes how a round feels from the first guess:
| Contexto | Semantle | |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback | Rank out of ~30,000 | Cosine similarity, plus rank if inside top 1,000 |
| Early guesses | Always informative — every word has a rank | Usually uninformative — most words score 0–8 |
| Colour bands | Green / orange / red by rank | None |
| Hints | Built-in tip system, three difficulty levels | None |
| Reset | Local midnight | Midnight UTC |
| Typical finish | 25–60 guesses | 60–200 guesses |
The practical consequence is that Contexto gives you a usable gradient from your very first guess, while Semantle gives you almost nothing until you stumble into the right region. Contexto’s ranking is a rank over the whole vocabulary, so “cheese” against the answer “moon” still returns a meaningful 3,644 — it tells you that cheese is closer than most words, which is genuinely useful information. Semantle’s score for the same pair would be a low number indistinguishable from a hundred other low numbers.
Neither is better; they solve different problems. Semantle is a search problem with a very sparse reward signal. Contexto is a gradient-following problem. If you want to understand the ranking mathematics that both games share, the guide to how Contexto’s ranking works covers the embedding model in plain language, and the same ideas apply directly to Semantle’s scores.
How hard is it
Hard enough that its own community treats a sub-50-guess finish as excellent. Three things drive the difficulty:
- The corpus is dated. Word2vec on Google News means the model’s sense of the world is roughly 2013. Words whose usage has shifted since then behave oddly.
- Antonyms score high. “Hot” and “cold” appear in nearly identical sentences, so the model reads them as close neighbours. Following a warm score can walk you to the exact opposite of the answer.
- No band structure. Without Contexto’s green/orange/red bands, you have no cheap way to tell a promising region from a dead one.
If that sounds punishing rather than fun, it is worth trying Contexto’s daily puzzle first — the ranked feedback makes the same core idea far more forgiving, and most players who bounce off Semantle come back to it happily after a few weeks of Contexto.
Where to go next
If Semantle appeals but you want it in another language, Cemantle is the French edition built by the same community and using a French-trained model, which produces noticeably different neighbourhoods. If you want the same “warmer / colder” feel applied to something other than words, Globle does it with countries on a globe and is a much gentler daily habit.
The full comparison of every game in this family, including seven more we did not give their own page, lives on the games like Contexto hub.