How to play Semantle? Try to play this latest Wordle clone if original version is too easy

Semantle is as mind-numbingly infuriating to the average Wordle player as it is satisfying to those who find the latter's hard mode and other harder spin-offs child's play.

At one point, it seemed like Absurdle, Octordle, and Kilorlde were the peak of Wordle-inspired variants designed specifically to heartily challenge the brain's cogs. However, this new variation is far off the rest's league in incomparability and almost punishingly tricky.

Semantle’s creator David Turner, a 41-year-old genius extraordinaire, is a New York-based software engineer who launched the game on February 27. Describing his creation, he said:

“It’s so weird. It’s so hard. It’s beyond anything that you think people should be able to do.”

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How does Semantle work, and how do you play it?

Though it may take a genius to succeed at Semantle, it certainly doesn’t take one to guess the game’s principle, going purely off of its name — semantics.

In this version, you are still guessing a secret word, but as the game description reads:

“It’s not about the spelling; it’s about the meaning.”

Words are also not limited to a specific number of letters.

David Turner lays down the rules of the guessing game:

“Semantle will tell you how semantically similar it thinks your word is to the secret word. The similarity value comes from Word2vec. By ‘semantically similar,’ I mean, roughly ‘used in the context of similar words, in a database of news articles.’”

Players are greeted with a wall of text as soon as they enter the game, and it would be well-advised to read it thoroughly and then some. While you’re at it, it would also be wise to familiarize yourself with the already collated list of FAQs to understand the workings of this perplexing game better.

As you fire off your guesses, Google-owned Word2vec will keep you abreast of your progress with a similarity index and a ‘Getting close?’ hot-and-cold indicator.

The highest possible similarity is 100, which indicates that the words are identical and you have won. However, even the nearest word before the correct answer rarely yields a similarity index higher than 75. Meanwhile, in theory, the lowest is -100, but in practice, it’s around -34.

Turner explains the hot-and-cold indicator’s functioning:

“The ‘Getting close’ indicator tells you how close you are — if your word is one of the 1,000 nearest normal words to the target word, the rank will be given (1000 is the target word itself). If your word is not one of the nearest 1000, you’re ‘cold.’”

Once you’ve crossed over from the terrain of ‘cold’ words to ‘hot’ words with considerable similarity in meaning to the secret word, the game activates the ranking out of 1000.

Warning: This next section contains spoilers for today’s Semantle.

For instance, today’s word was ‘recruit,’ where ‘recruiting’ (similarity 71.47), ‘recruits’ (similarity 67.72), ‘recruited’ (65.54), and ‘recruitment’ (similarity 61.15) occupied the ranks of 999, 998, 997, and 996, respectively.

For this word, ‘squad’ (similarity 25.13) and ‘team’ (similarity 24.41) scored 449 and 519 out of 1000 on the indicator, respectively.

As this example demonstrates, the software’s judgment of similarity in meaning and contextual use can throw off a player quite a bit, especially in their initial guesses.

But Semantle forgives of such errors as it allows indefinite chances, or “dozens of guesses” in Turner’s words, to guess the secret word. A new word becomes available every day at midnight UTC or 5.00 am in the player’s specific timezone.