Today’s word ladder
The same two words for everyone, worked out from today’s date. Change one letter at a time, every rung a real word, and get from the top one to the bottom one.
A solution definitely exists
Most word ladder puzzles are made by choosing two words and hoping there is a path between them. That produces days where there is no answer at all, and nobody can tell which days those were — players assume they were not clever enough and give up on a puzzle that never had a route.
Today’s pair was made the other way round. The whole dictionary is treated as a network, with words joined when they differ by a single letter, and the puzzle is a walk outward from the starting word — the target is taken from the words sitting four to six steps away.
So the answer exists because the puzzle was made by walking it. And because the walk counts its own steps, the shortest possible ladder is known exactly, which is the number shown beside your own.
How it is scored
Steps taken, with the shortest possible ladder shown alongside for comparison. Time only breaks ties.
Matching the optimal is genuinely difficult and worth being pleased about. Coming in one or two steps over is a good day. Wandering rather more than that is how most ladders go the first time, and it still counts.
The deal stays open all day
An unfinished ladder is not recorded as a result. The chain simply waits, saved exactly as you left it, so a puzzle started over breakfast can be finished on the train.
That is safe to offer because the target stays reachable from wherever you have got to — there is no way to strand yourself, so coming back later never means coming back to a lost cause. Undo is unlimited as well, if you would rather unpick a line than carry on with it.
About the words
The dictionary is deliberately curated: a couple of thousand ordinary four-letter words rather than a full scrabble list. A bigger list would connect more words but would route puzzles through terms nobody has ever met, and a ladder whose answer depends on a word you have to look up is not a fair one to share with everybody.
If you try a real word that ought to be in there, please say so.
The streak
Word Ladder is the quickest daily on the site, which makes it the natural one for a day with no time in it. Finishing any single daily keeps your site-wide streak going — there is only one streak and it covers every game.
Past ladders stay playable in the archive, each regenerated from its own date.
Stuck on the same kind of rung every time? The Word Ladder strategy guide covers working backwards from the target, and sits above unlimited practice ladders.