Semantle uses semantic similarities to help you guess the mystery word, rather than spelling.
Wordle equivalents such as Absurdle and Octordle looked to have hit their limit in terms of difficulty, but now there’s something new to make you want to pull out your hair all over again.
In Semantle, instead of guessing based on spelling, you guess a word based on semantic similarity. What this means is the frequency with which a term appears in comparable settings.
Semantle will tell you whether you’re hot or cold for every word you guess based on how close you are to the top 1,000 most similar words. In addition, it will give you a number indicating how near the word is: It’s easy to know whether you’re on the right track if you see a score of 100 next to each phrase. This may theoretically fall as low as -100, but “in reality it’s roughly -34,” says game designer David Turner.
As difficult as it seems, Wordle’s six guesses are not enough to get you started. The vocabulary in the game is based on the 5,000 most common English language terms (with hyphenated and capitalised ones removed) and not all of them are nouns.
Then, how does it really operate in the field? “Cooperate” was the word of the day yesterday. That implies that phrases like “collaborate,” “comply,” “engage,” and “relent” were all in the top ten, with “cooperating” scoring between 59.16 and 77.18.
“misgovern,” “vacate,” and “lenient” are some of the less-than-helpful recommendations you’ll find toward the bottom of the top 1,000, even if they may get your scores out of the 20s.
It’s possible that some of the linked terms aren’t as near as they should be since this uses Word2vec and a Google News data set. In the end, they are all phrases that are used in similar settings, which isn’t all that useful when you’re trying to find today’s needle.
As a result, it’s a difficult endeavour that isn’t suitable for everyone. You may be better off staying with the original Wordle solution since it takes so long to come up with six possibilities.