Word Labyrinth

About Word Labyrinth

Word Labyrinth is a free daily word ladder for the web, iOS and Android, made by CoreDL d.o.o. — a small independent studio in Croatia. Our aim is simple and stubborn: give one of the oldest, most elegant word puzzles in English a beautiful, fair, distraction-free home, with the same fresh puzzle for every player on the planet, every single day.

Our mission

We want Word Labyrinth to be the place you go to play a word ladder — the way the crossword has its place and Wordle has its. That means a daily puzzle you can finish in a few minutes, identical for a player in Zagreb, Manchester and Chicago so scores compare honestly; a clean board with no advertising on the puzzle screen; and a ladder that has been checked to be solvable and fair before it ever reaches you. Nothing flashy. Just the puzzle, treated with care.

Who we are

Word Labyrinth is built by CoreDL d.o.o., a tiny independent studio based in Croatia. We are word-puzzle players first — the kind of people who finish the crossword on the train and argue about whether a word is "really" a word — and engineers and designers second. There is no marketing department and no outside investor steering the roadmap. The same small group chooses the puzzles, curates the dictionary, designs the interface, writes this blog and answers your email.

We chose the word ladder, out of all the puzzles we could have built, for a practical reason and a sentimental one. Practically, it is a wonderful daily format: short enough to fit into a coffee break, deep enough to reward years of play, and language-agnostic enough to travel across borders. Sentimentally, we think it has been quietly overlooked. The crossword, the anagram and the five-letter guess all have polished modern homes; the ladder, which is just as old and arguably more graceful, mostly did not. We set out to fix that.

From a Victorian parlour to your phone

The word ladder is not our invention — it is Lewis Carroll's. In the winter of 1877–79, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Carroll's real name) devised a game he called Doublets, in which you transform one word into another by changing a single letter at a time, with every intermediate step being a genuine word. He published it as a regular puzzle column in Vanity Fair magazine, complete with rules and a scoring system. His own famous challenges included turning HEAD into TAIL and COLD into WARM — puzzles you can still solve today by the very same rules:

HEAD → HEAL → TEAL → TELL → TALL → TAIL
COLD → CORD → WORD → WARD → WARM

Nearly a hundred and fifty years on, the rules have not changed at all. What had not caught up was the experience around them. We built Word Labyrinth to be the modern daily home Carroll's puzzle never quite got — a polished app instead of a newspaper column, with a fresh ladder waiting each morning, streaks to keep you honest, and a global board so the world plays the same puzzle at once. If you want the full history, we have written it up in detail in the story of Lewis Carroll's Doublets.

How a daily puzzle is made

A puzzle that looks effortless takes a lot of quiet checking behind the scenes. We will not give away the technical machinery — that part is ours — but we are happy to explain our standards, because they are what make the game fair.

The dictionary comes first. Every ladder is built on a curated, family-friendly English word list, comparable in scope to those used by Scrabble and Wordle. We filter out the words that make a puzzle feel like a trick rather than a challenge: obscure archaisms most people have never met, and offensive or slur-adjacent words that have no place in a game the whole family might play. The goal is a dictionary where, when you finally see the answer, your reaction is "of course" rather than "that's not a real word".

Every ladder is verified before it ships. We confirm that each daily puzzle is genuinely solvable, that an optimal path is precomputed for each one, and that the chain of words holds together cleanly from start to target. A puzzle that cannot be solved, or that hides behind a single impossibly rare bridge word, never reaches you.

Difficulty is calibrated, not random. A good day should give a casual player a satisfying win and still hand an expert something to chew on. We tune the spread of the daily ladder — shorter, friendlier puzzles alongside longer ones with trickier turns — so that both kinds of player come away feeling they had a real game. The same ladder goes to everyone, so the difficulty you face is the difficulty the whole world faces.

Editorial standards and sourcing

This site is more than a board: we write about the puzzle's history, its strategy and how it compares to other daily games. We hold that writing to the same standard we hold the puzzles. When we make a historical or linguistic claim — that Carroll devised Doublets in 1877, say, or that a given word is valid — we check it against reliable, citable sources rather than repeating folklore. Where the historical record is uncertain or contested, we say so plainly instead of inventing a tidy figure, and we do not fabricate statistics, studies or quotations to make a point land harder.

We also get things wrong sometimes, and when we do we want to fix them in public. If you spot an error of fact on any of our pages — a misdated event, a word that should not have passed our filter, a ladder that does not hold — email us and we will correct it and note what changed. Accuracy is a feature, not an afterthought.

Who writes this

There is no anonymous content mill here. The puzzles, the apps and the articles on this site — including the pieces on the blog — are written and maintained by the team at CoreDL d.o.o., the same people who build the game. We sign our work as a studio rather than hiding behind a faceless brand, and we genuinely read the mail. If something we have written helped you, confused you, or could be better, we would like to hear it. The address is below.

Accessibility and fairness

A puzzle is only fair if everyone can actually reach it. The commitments we have already shipped:

We are not finished. Improved screen-reader support and a dyslexia-friendly font option are both on the roadmap, and accessibility feedback jumps the queue when we plan a release. If a barrier is stopping you from playing, tell us — that is exactly the kind of report we most want.

What's next

Word Labyrinth is an active, maintained product, not something we shipped once and walked away from. We would rather be honest about what is genuinely coming than promise a wishlist, so here is what we are actually working towards:

Roadmaps slip; we will not pretend they do not. But these are the directions we are steering, and the order shifts based on what players ask for most.

Contact and press

We are easy to reach, and you do not have to read the legal fine print to find a human. For feedback, bug reports, accessibility issues, partnerships or just to say hello, write to us via the contact details on our Impressum page, or through the Settings → About → Contact screen inside the app. We read every message ourselves.

Journalists, puzzle communities, teachers and partners are all welcome to get in touch. A press kit — logos, screenshots and a short fact sheet — is available on request; just email and ask. We are glad to talk about the game's history, how we run a small independent studio, or anything else that might be useful for a story.

Privacy, terms and your rights

Plainly stated, because trust matters more than legalese:

Play the puzzle we look after

Today's ladder is ready and takes only a few minutes. We hope it gives you a good day.

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