The Word Ladder game
Word Ladder is a daily challenge to transform a starting word to a target word, changing just one letter at a time.
First off, you see the starting word, the target word, and a blank line in between:
You enter a new word, and and a new blank line is added:
The green background indicates a letter that matches the same letter in the target word. When you finish the challenge, all four letters will have a green background.
In each step, you can only change one letter in the word. Starting with MIST, we changed the second letter from I to O, to get the word MOST.
You can't think of any words? No problem!
After 40 seconds, a small "neighbours" symbol is displayed to the left of the word.
Touch it, or hold your mouse over it, and you get a diagram showing all the neighbouring words.
COST might be a good choice, because it starts with a C, just like the target word.
You think that's cheating? It's up to you, you don't have to look at that diagram.
You can probably see the solution now. Here it is:
That was easy!
Here is another example:
Try this game out for yourself
The daily challenge
Every day there is a new word ladder to solve.
Click here to play today's game.
Practice games with three levels of difficulty
Apart from the daily game, you can start a practice game at one of three levels of difficulty.
Try it out with one of the following links:
The history of word games
Are you interested in word games?
Word Ladder has a fascinating history. It was invented by Lewis Carroll and first published in 1879.
Read more about it in:
Word Ladder is one of a class of games published in newspapers and magazines.
Crosswords are now the best known game of this type, but they were not invented until 1913.
Read more about word games in:
Before the age of mass literacy, there weren't any word games as we know them, but even ancient scribes seem to have played with words.
Find out more in:
The word list
Word Ladder uses a comprehensive list of 4-letter words in the English language.
You can read about which words are included, and which words are not include, on our page
You can see the complete word list on our page