Semantle is the Wordle clone that will have you pulling your hair out

If you ever thought Wordle was way too easy and want something that’s punishingly difficult, then Semantle will easily meet the challenge.

Like Wordle, Semantle has you guessing the secret word of the day, but instead of basing the game on correct spelling, it’s on meaning. You have to narrow the correct word down by using other words that have a similar meaning. Since the game doesn’t give any sort of clues from the start, you use your initial guesses as the clues themselves.

Since there’s nothing to go off of, Semantle gives you an unlimited amount of guesses as even the creator David Turner admits that it will probably take you dozens of tries to win.

Semantle does help you with the Hot and Cold meter. In the game, there are 1000 words that are close in meaning to the secret word, and as you guess, the Semantle will tell you how close you are. If you’re way off, Semantle will tell you that word is “cold” and give a similarity ranking out of 100. A cold word could be 21.22 out of 100, for example. 

Once you reach 100, the winning word has an identical meaning according to the rules, and guesses start becoming “hot.” If you get a hot word, Semantle will give you a new ranking out of 1000 telling you how close you are to the winning guess.

Spoiler alert ahead in case you’re already working on today’s Semantle.

Semantle is certainly as difficult as it sounds. For example, the April 6 word shares a meaning with “insane”, but subsequent guesses failed to get the correct word.

Powering Semantle is a technology called Word2vec, which is an algorithm of sorts that learns word associations based on a data set. David Turner used a Google News data set from late 2021 to rank the words. This may explain why the words in Semantle may seem all over the place as that data is in a specific context that people may not be used to.

Semantle has gotten a following online, like the Subreddit dedicated to helping people out with the game. It currently stands at over 6,000 members at the time of this writing.

The game is in eight other languages, including Spanish, Hebrew, and Russian with more potentially on the way. Semantle resets every day at midnight UTC (5 pm PST/ 8 pm EST) with a brand new word.

Good luck.