Guide

Word game glossary

The terms that come up when people talk about word games and wordplay, each with a short definition and an example. Most apply to any word game, from crosswords to tile games.

Jump to: letters and sounds · building words · wordplay · where words come from · boards and grids

Letters and sounds

Vowel: A, E, I, O and U. Most English words need at least one, and the mix of vowels to consonants on a board decides what you can spell.
Semivowel: A letter that can act as a vowel or a consonant. Y is the main one in English: a consonant in YES, a vowel in GYM and RHYTHM. W works as a vowel in a few Welsh borrowings such as CWM and CRWTH.
Digraph: Two letters that make one sound, such as SH, CH, TH, PH and the vowel pair EA. Spotting digraphs helps you see which letter pairs are likely to sit side by side.
Consonant blend: Two or three consonants said together while each keeps its own sound, like BL, STR and SPL. STRENGTHS has a blend at each end.
Rare letter: A letter that appears in few words, usually J, Q, X and Z, then K, V, W and Y. Many games give extra points for them because they are harder to use.
Q without U: Words where Q is not followed by U. Almost all come from Arabic, Hebrew or Chinese, such as QAT, QOPH, FAQIR and QIGONG. See the full list.

Building words

Anagram: A word made by rearranging all the letters of another word. LISTEN and SILENT are anagrams. In a game with a fixed set of letters, knowing anagrams means more than one order can work.
Alphagram: A word's letters sorted into alphabetical order. EILNST is the alphagram of LISTEN, SILENT, ENLIST and TINSEL. Serious players study alphagrams to learn every anagram of a set of letters at once.
Hook: A single letter added to the front or end of a word to make a new word. S hooks onto the end of most nouns. Front hooks are less obvious: A turns MEND into AMEND and WAKE into AWAKE.
Inner hook: A letter that can be added inside a word to make another, such as R in FIEND to make FRIEND.
Stem: A group of letters that combines with many single letters to form words. SATIRE is a well-known stem: in the Unsaid dictionary, 18 of the 26 letters can join it and be rearranged into a seven-letter word.
Prefix and suffix: Letters added to the start (prefix) or end (suffix) of a word to change its meaning or form, like UN-, RE-, -ING, -LY and -NESS. Learning the common ones lets you see long words forming before they are complete.
Inflection: A change to a word's ending for grammar, such as plurals (CATS), past tense (WALKED) or comparison (FASTER). Most word games accept inflected forms as separate words.
Variant spelling: A second accepted way to spell the same word, such as COLOR and COLOUR, or VIZIER and VEZIR. Large dictionaries accept many variants, which gives you more options.
Hidden word: A shorter word inside a longer one, letters in order and side by side. HEARTH hides HEART, HEAR, EARTH, EAR and ART. In falling-letter games a hidden word can clear before you finish the longer one.

Wordplay

Palindrome: A word that reads the same forward and backward, like LEVEL, KAYAK and RACECAR.
Semordnilap: A word that spells a different word backward, like STRESSED and DESSERTS, or DRAWER and REWARD. The name is palindromes spelled backward.
Isogram: A word with no repeated letters, such as DERMATOGLYPHICS and UNCOPYRIGHTABLE, two of the longest at fifteen letters each.
Pangram: A sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In some puzzles it also means a word that uses every letter offered.
Lipogram: Writing that avoids a letter on purpose. The best-known example is a French novel by Georges Perec, written without the letter E, and its English translation, which keeps the rule.
Univocalic: A word or text that uses only one vowel, repeated as needed. STRENGTHS uses only E, and so does DEFENSELESSNESS.
Kangaroo word: A word that carries a synonym inside it, in order but not side by side. MASCULINE holds MALE, and RAMPAGE holds RAGE.
Word ladder: A puzzle where you change one word into another one letter at a time, making a real word at each step: COLD, CORD, CARD, WARD, WARM. Lewis Carroll invented it in 1877 and called it Doublets.
Heteronym: Words spelled the same but said differently with different meanings, such as LEAD the metal and LEAD to guide, or WIND the air and WIND a clock.
Homophone: Words that sound the same but differ in meaning and often spelling, like PAIR and PEAR, or KNIGHT and NIGHT.

Where words come from

Etymology: The history of a word: where it came from and how its form and meaning changed. Every word of the day page has a short one.
Loanword: A word taken from another language, like MEZE from Turkish or CAJON from Spanish. Loanwords bring unusual letter patterns into English, such as Q without U or words ending in I.
Cognate: Words in different languages that share an ancestor, like English NIGHT, German NACHT and Latin NOX.
Portmanteau: A word blended from two others, like BRUNCH from breakfast and lunch, or SMOG from smoke and fog.
Eponym: A word named after a person or place, like SANDWICH, after the Earl of Sandwich, or YTTRIUM, after the Swedish village Ytterby.
Acronym: A word formed from the first letters of a phrase and said as a word, like LASER, SCUBA and RADAR. Once common, many become ordinary lowercase words that take plurals.

Boards and grids

Across and down: The two directions words read in most grid games: left to right, and top to bottom. Crosswords, tile games and falling-letter games all use them.
Cascade: In falling-letter and falling-block games, the chain reaction when cleared letters leave gaps and the letters above drop into them, sometimes forming new words.
Chain: A run of clears set off by one move. Games that reward chains usually multiply the score of each step.
Daily puzzle: A puzzle that is the same for every player on a given date, so results can be compared. Most daily games start a new puzzle at local midnight. See our list of daily word games.