Guide
How to Play Contexto
Contexto is a free daily word puzzle game. There is a secret word — your job is to find it by guessing words that are ranked by how close they are in meaning. No letter clues, no spelling hints, no guess limit. Just pure semantic navigation — making it one of the most unique word guessing games available online.
Step-by-step
Type any word
Start with any word you like. Common nouns are a good opening move since they cover many concepts. There are no wrong first guesses — every guess gives you information.
Read the rank
After each guess you see a rank. Rank 1 is the secret word, rank 50 is very close, rank 5,000 means the right broad territory, and anything past 10,000 is a different area of meaning entirely. The dictionary holds 99,949 words, so the worst possible rank is a long way down. Lower is always better.
Follow the trail
Your guesses sort automatically from closest to furthest. Watch for clusters — if several guesses in the same semantic area all rank under 200, the answer is somewhere in that neighbourhood of meaning.
Home in on rank 1
Use your best-ranked guess as a springboard. Think: what words mean roughly the same thing? What broader category does it belong to? Synonyms, related concepts, and collocations often rank much better than spelling-similar words.
Use hints wisely
Four hint types are available: Category (what type of thing the secret word is), Related word (a semantically close word), Word length, and First letter. Use them if you're stuck — they don't disqualify you.
Understanding the rank colours
Hints explained
Category hint
Reveals the broad category the secret word belongs to (e.g., "Animals", "Emotions", "Verbs of movement").
Related word hint
Reveals a word that is semantically close to the answer — not a synonym, but a neighbour in meaning space.
Word length hint
Tells you how many letters the secret word has. Useful for ruling out entire word classes.
First letter hint
Reveals the first letter of the secret word. A powerful hint — use it when all else fails.
Tips and strategies
Start broad, then narrow
Open with high-frequency nouns like "house", "time", "water", or "person". These cover large areas of meaning and their ranks tell you which semantic region to explore.
Think about word categories, not spelling
If "doctor" ranks 80, try other medical words: "nurse", "hospital", "medicine", "patient". Don't try "rector" because it looks similar — that's a Wordle instinct, not a Contexto one.
The rank gap tells you how close you are
If your best guess jumped from rank 3,000 to rank 150 with one guess, you've found a fruitful area. If the gap between your top guesses is small (e.g., 1, 3, 5), you're very close and should try precise synonyms.
Plurals and verb forms count as separate words
"Run" and "runs" are treated as the same answer but different guesses. Try both forms of words you think are close — one might rank significantly better than the other.
Don't ignore abstract words
The secret word could be a verb, adjective, or abstract noun — not just a concrete object. If concrete nouns aren't working, try verbs ("flow", "build", "move") or adjectives ("bright", "heavy", "soft").
A worked example: the 12 September 2026 puzzle
Rules explain the mechanics; watching a solve explains the game. Below is a real sequence of guesses against a real past answer, with the actual ranks the puzzle returned. The answer that day was fox — but read the ranks first and see how long it takes you to get there. The full semantic neighbourhood for that day is on its archive page.
| # | Guess | Rank | What it told the player |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | animal | 5,870 | A broad opener — and a disappointing one. Category words are not close to their members. |
| 2 | creature | 4,976 | Barely an improvement. Confirms the problem is the level of abstraction, not the topic. |
| 3 | dog | 938 | The first real signal. Dropping to a specific animal moves the rank by a factor of five. |
| 4 | bear | 853 | About the same. So it is a specific animal, but which kind is still open. |
| 5 | wolf | 122 | The breakthrough. Wild canid territory — everything after this stays in that neighbourhood. |
| 6 | hunt | 627 | A deliberate sideways test. Worse than wolf, so the answer is the animal, not the activity. |
| 7 | fur | 10,586 | The trap. Obviously fox-related by definition, and almost the worst guess on the board. |
| 8 | fox | 1 | Solved. |
Three lessons come out of that board, and all three contradict what most new players assume.
Broad words are not good openers. Most guides tell you to start general and narrow down. Here, animal scored 5,870 against an animal. Category labels appear in text alongside every member of the category and none of them in particular, so they sit in a vague region of their own rather than near any specific thing. A middling concrete noun beats an abstract category almost every time.
Definitional relationships are not the same as usage relationships. A fox has fur. Every dictionary agrees. But fur scored 10,586 — worse than animal, worse than almost anything else tried — because the two words rarely show up in the same sentences. Foxes get written about in the context of hunting, woods and folklore; fur gets written about in the context of coats and trade. This is the single most common reason a guess that feels right comes back terrible.
Test sideways, not just forward. Guess 6 was not an attempt at the answer. It was a cheap question: is this a creature or an activity? The answer came back creature, which closed off an entire branch of the search for the cost of one guess. Deliberately spending a guess to rule something out is usually faster than three more hopeful attempts in the same direction.
Choosing an opening guess
Unlike letter games, there is no mathematically optimal opener here — no equivalent of picking a word with five common letters. What a good opener does is cheaply locate which region of meaning the answer lives in, and the fastest way to do that is to fire three or four guesses from deliberately distant regions before trying to refine any of them.
A workable spread: one concrete physical object (water, metal), one person or role (doctor, child), one action (build, move), and one abstract quality (power, fear). Whichever of those scores best is your starting direction; the rest have done their job by scoring badly.
Resist refining a guess that scored in the thousands. Because rank compresses so hard in the tail, a word at 3,000 is not meaningfully warmer than one at 8,000, and exploring around it usually burns five guesses to learn nothing. Wait until something lands under roughly 500 before you start working the neighbourhood.
Secret words are drawn from the more common end of English vocabulary, so an answer is rarely exotic. If you find yourself reaching for specialist terminology, the problem is usually the region rather than the precision — go back to a broad sweep.
What to do when you are properly stuck
The classic dead end is a cluster of guesses all sitting between rank 50 and rank 300 with nothing breaking through. That pattern almost always means you have the right topic but the wrong part of speech, or the wrong level of specificity.
Try the same concept as a different word class — if drive is stuck at 60, try driver, driving, car, road. Try the thing one step up and one step down in specificity. Try the word you would use for it in a completely different register: the formal term, the casual term, the technical term.
If that fails, the closer-word hint is the efficient exit. It is calculated against your own best guess so far and lands roughly halfway to the answer, so the better your board already is, the more precisely it delivers. Taking it at rank 60 gives you something around rank 30; taking it at rank 9,000 gives you something around 4,500, which is nearly useless. Hints reward being stuck close rather than stuck far — which is the opposite of when most players reach for them.
Contexto vs other word puzzle games
Contexto is often described as a Wordle alternative, but it plays very differently. Here is how it compares to the most popular daily word games:
| Feature | Contexto | Wordle | Quordle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clue type | Meaning rank | Letter position | Letter position |
| Guess limit | Unlimited | 6 guesses | 9 guesses |
| Word length fixed? | No | 5 letters only | 5 letters only |
| Daily puzzle | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiplayer | Yes — rooms | No | No |
| Unlimited practice | Yes | No | No |
| Free | Yes | Yes | Yes |
If you enjoy Wordle, Quordle, or any letter-based word puzzle game, Contexto is a natural next step. It trains a completely different skill — semantic thinking — and most players find it significantly more challenging and addictive.
Ready to try it?
The best way to understand Contexto is to play it. Jump into today’s daily puzzle or practice in unlimited mode — no account required.