About Wordton

Why it exists

Looking up a hint for a daily puzzle is a strangely hostile experience. You want one nudge. You get a page that has buried it under six paragraphs about what Wordle is, and then, three lines below the nudge and above the fold, the answer in bold, which you have now read.

Wordton is built on the opposite assumption: that you know what game you are playing, that you know how much help you want, and that you are capable of deciding when to see the answer. Everything else follows from that.

The promise

No answer appears on a hint page until you open something to see it. Not in the heading, not in the page title, not in the description a search engine shows, not in a preview card, and not in a sentence beginning "spoiler ahead". The answer sits behind a control you have to click.

The hints themselves are labelled and ordered, vaguest first. A label tells you what kind of help is inside before you open it, so you can take a nudge about the theme without accidentally taking a nudge about the letters. Take one, take four, take none.

Who writes this

Wordton is written and built by Blake Boege. The daily hints, the word game guides and the Scrabble pages are his; so is the search that runs over the 173,310 word dictionary underneath them. There is no editorial team behind that, which is worth saying plainly rather than hiding behind a company voice.

He is on X and LinkedIn, and the fastest way to reach him about anything on the site is the address further down this page.

How the hints get written

By hand, every morning, by a person who has played the puzzle. Nothing on the daily pages is generated. Somebody sits down with the day's Wordle, Connections, Strands, Mini Crossword, Pips, Sports Connections and Quordle, solves them, and then writes four to six clues that give real help without giving the game away, which is a harder piece of writing than it sounds.

That is also why the pages carry a timestamp. If a hint page says it was updated at 6:04 this morning, it was. When a puzzle has not been written up yet, the page says so instead of showing you yesterday's and hoping you do not notice. Past days move to the archives with the answers in the open, since nobody arriving there is trying to avoid them.

Where the words come from

The finder searches ENABLE, a public-domain list of about 172,800 English words, plus a supplement of 487 modern words we curated because ENABLE was frozen in 1997 and has never heard of a podcast. Definitions come from Princeton's WordNet. Both are credited in the footer of every page. Counts on this site are computed from that list when the site is built, not typed in by hand, so when a page says there are 136 words starting with X, something counted them.

It also means the list has edges, and we would rather point at them than pretend they are not there. ENABLE is not the New York Times' answer list and not every game's dictionary; where that distinction matters, the page in question says so.

Who it is for

Anyone stuck on a daily puzzle, anyone with a rack of letters and no idea what to do with them, and anyone who has ever argued about whether funner is a word. Also crossword solvers, Scrabble players, teachers, and parents looking for short words a six-year-old can actually read.

Getting it wrong

A hint written at six in the morning about a puzzle somebody else set is a thing that can be wrong, and occasionally is. When it is, the page is corrected in place at the same URL rather than quietly deleted, and the timestamp on it moves so you can see it changed. A hint that gave away more than it should have gets rewritten the same way.

Two things that are never edited after the fact: the answer itself, and the archive. A past day stays exactly as it ran. If we were wrong about a word being valid, the correction goes on the page that made the claim, because that is the page somebody will land on next time.

Say hello

If a hint is wrong, a page is broken, or the dictionary is missing something obvious, tell us: contact@wordton.com. Corrections to the daily hints get looked at first, because those have a clock on them. There is more on how to reach us, and what we can actually help with, on the contact page.

Two more things worth knowing, both written to be read rather than skipped: what we do and do not collect is set out on the privacy page, and where the dictionary and the definitions come from, along with the licences they carry, is on the terms page.