Play the Contexto puzzle from August 18, 2026
The real board from that day, playable now. Guess the secret word by meaning — every guess comes back ranked, and rank 1 is the answer. The answer itself, the words closest to it and what other players guessed are all below, behind a spoiler.
Show the answer, its closest words and what players guessed
The Contexto answer for August 18, 2026 was river.
2
100%
53
nature
5
The words closest to “river”
Every one of the 99,949 words in the dictionary was scored against river by cosine similarity between their embedding vectors, then sorted. These are the nearest everyday nouns, with the rank a player would have seen had they guessed them. Plural forms and proper nouns are folded out of this list — in the raw ranking they crowd the top.
- #3creek0.829
- #4tributary0.822
- #5valley0.821
- #6basin0.803
- #9lake0.788
- #10confluence0.787
- #12estuary0.776
- #13canal0.770
- #14shore0.769
- #15canyon0.758
- #23bridge0.727
- #25fork0.724
How fast the trail goes cold
Rank is not linear in meaning. The gap between rank 10 and rank 100 is far wider than the raw numbers suggest, which is why a guess at rank 400 can feel maddeningly close and still be nowhere near. Here is what each depth actually looked like for river:
| Rank | Word at that depth | Similarity |
|---|---|---|
| #53 | mouth | 0.671 |
| #252 | port | 0.561 |
| #1,001 | mainland | 0.445 |
| #10,005 | star | 0.225 |
About this puzzle
On August 18, 2026, the Contexto secret word was river— puzzle #60, a nature-category word with 5 letters. 2 players attempted it, 100% of them finding the word, averaging 53 guesses.
Not sure how the ranking works or want the full strategy breakdown? The how to play guide covers the semantic ranking mechanic, hint types, and tips for narrowing in faster.
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A new secret word is waiting — November 7, 2026