Swipe-to-spell word games

Getting unstuck

• Work the crossing letters. A filled square inside an empty slot narrows the options more than looking at the wheel again.
• Say the letters aloud in a different order. Reading them out can sometimes shake a word loose when your eye has settled on one grouping.
• Try prefixes and suffixes systematically. RE-, UN-, -ED, -ER, -ING. Checking whether the remaining letters form a stem is faster than free association.
• Start with the shortest slot. Three-letter words come quickly, and each one places letters into the longer words that cross it.

What makes a good letter set

• Enough vowels. Two or three in a set of seven. Fewer and there is little to build on; more and everything becomes an anagram of everything else.
• One long anchor word. Sets are usually built backwards from a word that uses every letter, which guarantees the board can be finished. Every Wordy level has one.

This game precomputes its boards rather than generating them live, in all six languages, so every grid has been checked to be completable with the letters given.

Why the grid does the work

A set of seven letters usually yields dozens of valid words. Asking for all of them would be a vocabulary test with a long tail of obscure entries, and you would never know when you were done.

The crossword grid bounds the task. It states how many words are wanted and how long each one is: seven slots, one five-letter word crossing a four. You can see how far you have left to go.

Filling a long word also writes letters into every slot that crosses it, so several answers become readable at once. In Wordy, if those crossings happen to reveal every square of another slot, that word is marked solved without you tracing it.

Where the format came from

Linking letters into a word existed before touchscreens, but it is the thumb gesture, on a circle of letters, that took over on phones. The pairing of a letter wheel with a crossword grid was popularised by Wordscapes, released in 2017.

Since then, most games of the genre, often called word connect games, keep that grid rather than a plain list of the words you have found. The grid shows what is still missing, so a board has a visible end.

In this game

Controls

Press a letter on the wheel and drag through the others without lifting, the word appears in the band above. Lift to submit. Sliding back onto the previous letter undoes it. Three letters minimum, and no letter twice in the same word.

• Left button: shuffles the letters, as often as you want.
• Right button: a hint reveals one letter of a word you haven't found.
• Flag top right: switches the word language, six of them, each with its own levels and progress.

What counts

Only the words in the grid fill its tiles. Any other real word your letters spell is a bonus, it lands in the ★ jar, never on the grid. A crossing can complete a word for you, and it counts as found. No timer, no move limit.

Frequently asked questions