Word Labyrinth

Word Ladder Glossary

By the maker of Word Labyrinth at CoreDL d.o.o. · Updated 6 October 2026

The words that come up when people talk about word ladders and about this game, explained the way you would explain them to a friend across the table. Each entry stands on its own and has an anchor, so you can link straight to it. If you have never played, read word ladder and step first, then go and play one.

Adding a letter

The one move Word Labyrinth allows that Lewis Carroll did not. Besides changing a letter, a step may add one: CAT to CART is legal, and so is CART to CHART. You cannot take a letter away working forwards, but you can build the chain from the target end instead, and seen from there the same move looks like a removal. It means the start and target words do not have to be the same length. The Pure Swap weekly challenge turns this move off.

Bridge word

The word a ladder cannot do without. SHIP and STOP look close, but you cannot get from one to the other in a single change; SHOP is the rung that connects them.

SHIP → SHOP → STOP

In most puzzles the start and target are ordinary words and the bridge is the odd one: CORD between COLD and WORD, GIRT between GIRL and GIFT. Finding the bridge usually is the puzzle, which is why experienced players collect them.

Daily ladder

The five puzzles everyone in the world gets on the same day, in the same order, from easy to hard. They are the ranked part of the game: they count for your rank, your streak and the leaderboard, and they change at midnight UTC. Once a day is over its five go into the puzzle archive with their shortest solutions.

Dead end

A word you can reach but cannot usefully leave. You are three rungs in, every change you try is either not a word or a word already in your chain, and the target is no nearer than when you started. The fix is to delete back to where you went wrong and try another branch. A hint taken in a dead end will tell you how many words to take back before it suggests the next one.

Doublet

Lewis Carroll's name for the puzzle. He invented it in 1877, published it in Vanity Fair from 1879, and set the start and target as a pair, hence "doublet". His COLD to WARM is still the standard example:

COLD → CORD → WORD → WARD → WARM

"Word ladder" became the usual name later. Same puzzle. The story with dates is in the Doublets article.

Expert mode

An unlimited run of puzzles whose shortest solution is at least 8 steps. There is no timer. Expert games still earn stars towards your rank, up to three each, and it is where people go when the daily five are done and they want a ladder long enough to get lost in.

Hint

Ask for a hint and the game gives you the next word on a shortest path from wherever you are now. If you are in a dead end it first says how many words to remove. Each hint lowers the score of the puzzle it is used on, so the leaderboard still rewards solving without them. Hints are a balance you carry around: you start with two, earn one for finishing all five daily puzzles without a skip, one for every two practice games, two for a weekly challenge and a batch at each streak milestone. They also pay for streak freezes.

Island word

A word with no neighbours: nothing one letter away from it is a word. You can never ladder into or out of one, so it never appears in a puzzle. Odd spellings and very rare words are the usual islands.

Minimum steps

The length of the optimal path, counted in steps. This is the number the result screen shows as "Optimal" next to your own count.

Neighbour

Any word you can reach from a given word in one step. CAT has COT, BAT, CAR, CAP, CUT and more; it is a well-connected word, which makes it easy to pass through. A word with one or two neighbours is a corridor, and a word with none is an island. How many neighbours a word has is the best quick guide to how hard it will be to work with.

Optimal path

The shortest valid chain from start to target. Many puzzles have several optimal paths of the same length and plenty of longer ones; all are solutions, but only the shortest score full marks. Word Labyrinth works this out for every puzzle before it is published, which is how it can grade you against it without ever showing it during play.

Perfect solve

Finishing a puzzle in exactly the minimum number of steps. The leaderboard counts them, and it is the only way to get the full star count for a puzzle.

Practice mode

Unlimited puzzles at a difficulty you pick from 1 to 10, with no effect on your rank or streak. Every two practice puzzles you finish earn a hint.

Ranked

Play that counts: the daily ladder. Your steps, time and hints there feed your rank, your streak and your place on the leaderboard.

Rank

Where you stand: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond, each split into III, II and I, then Master and Grandmaster at the top. You climb by collecting stars from ranked, expert and challenge puzzles; each rank needs 3 to 5 of them. Stop playing for more than two days and you lose a star a day until you come back.

Skip

Giving up on one puzzle. You can skip once a day; the game then shows you a shortest solution and that puzzle scores zero stars. The rest of the ladder still counts and your streak survives, but the hint for finishing a full ladder is not awarded on a day with a skip.

Stars

What a finished puzzle is worth towards your rank: the minimum number of steps earns the full count, one step over earns one less, and anything longer earns one. The count is capped by difficulty, so in the daily ladder the easy and medium puzzles pay one star and the hard one pays two; three in a single puzzle only happens in expert mode.

Start word and target word

The two ends of the puzzle. The start is where you begin, the target is what you have to turn it into, and everything in between is yours to find. You can build from either end: type a word that is one step from the target and it slots in at the bottom of the chain.

Step

One move: change one letter (or add one) and land on a real word. Steps count the moves between words, not the words. COLD, CORD, WORD, WARD, WARM is five words and four steps, one per arrow. When the game says "Optimal: 4", that is four steps, so a five-word chain matches it.

Streak

The number of days in a row on which you finished at least one of the daily puzzles. At 3, 7, 14, 30, 60, 100 and 365 days you receive 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 25 and 50 hints. Miss a day without a freeze and it resets, though a broken streak can be recovered for 10 hints per missed day.

Streak freeze

Insurance for one missed day. If you have a freeze when you skip a day, it is spent automatically and the streak carries on. Two days missed in a row is not covered. A freeze costs 5 hints, or about a euro from the store.

Unsolvable pair

Two words no chain can connect, however long you let it run, because one of them is an island or the two sit in separate corners of the language with no rung in common. Every puzzle in Word Labyrinth is checked before it is published, so you will not meet one in the game; the term matters when you invent ladders of your own and wonder why one will not close. Why some word ladders are impossible has examples.

Weekly challenge

A set of puzzles with a rule twist, one challenge per week: Pure Swap allows letter changes only, no adding; Speed Run makes the clock worth half your score; Long Words bans anything under five letters; Perfectionist scores zero for anything over the minimum; Marathon is 15 puzzles that get steep fast. Finishing a challenge earns two hints.

Word graph

A way of picturing the language: every word is a dot, and two dots are joined when the words are neighbours. A ladder is then a route through the dots. You never need to draw it, but it explains why some pairs connect in two steps and others take twelve, and why a word with lots of neighbours is a good place to pass through.

Word ladder

The puzzle itself. Turn one word into another by changing a single letter at a time, with every word along the way being a real word:

CAT → COT → DOT → DOG

Three steps from CAT to DOG. Add a target that is further away than it looks and you have a daily word puzzle. The fuller definition and history are on What is a word ladder?, and twenty solved ladders show the terms above in use.

Put the words to work

Today's five puzzles. The first one is easy.

Play Word Labyrinth

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