Word ladder

Help

You get a start word and a target word of the same length. Change one letter at a time until you reach the target. Every step has to be a word this page knows. A round is five ladders, and the round ends when the fifth one ends.

Type the next word in the box and press Enter. On a phone it is quicker to tap a letter of your word and type the letter that replaces it, which takes the step at once. The green ring marks the letter that changed on each rung.

Three letter ladders are four to five words long counting the ends, four letter ladders are five to six, and five letter ladders are six to seven. Longer words have fewer neighbors, so a five letter ladder asks for more searching.

The shortest ladder is worked out by searching every word of that length before you start, so it is exact. A ladder is only used when the shortest path can also be walked with everyday words, so you are never asked for a word you have not met.

A step is accepted if it is in a list of ordinary English words of that length, from about 640 three letter words to about 5,100 five letter ones, built from a public word list. Names, abbreviations and offensive words are left out. If an ordinary word is refused, the report link at the top of the round is the place to say so.

Hint puts the next word of a shortest path on the ladder for you. Show a path prints the rest of the way and marks the ladder as shown; it never types the words for you. Both are counted. A round with a hint or a shown path is saved and counts on your statistics page, and it is left out of the community comparison.

The result is how many of the five ladders reached their target, and how many steps above the shortest ladders that took. Undo takes a step back and the count goes down with it. A ladder you leave counts as not climbed and adds no extra steps.

The score says how you did on these five ladders. It is not a vocabulary test, and it says nothing about your reading or your spelling.

The statistics page compares rounds at the same word length. What it shows is how many ladders you climbed and how long you took.

Type the next word in the box and press Enter. Tab reaches the letters of your word; press Enter or Space on one and type the letter that replaces it. With a letter or one of the tools in focus, press z to take a step back and h for a hint. Escape stops the round, from the typing box as well. End stops it too, except in the typing box, where it moves the caret.

Change a vowel first, and work from both ends until they meet. Learn how to change one letter