About Phonemo

A word game for your ears.

Phonemo is an independently built daily word game, made around a simple question: what if a word puzzle cared about how words sound instead of how they are spelled?

Each day brings one secret word. You can make as many pings as you like. There is no timer and no losing screen. The challenge is finding your way from a distant word to a close one, then to the answer.

How the ranking works

Phonemo compares recorded word pronunciations from a public dictionary. It looks at the sounds throughout each word, the vowels, the ending, and the number of syllables. Similar sounds count as closer than very different ones. The spelling and meaning never enter the comparison.

Every possible ping gets a place in an ordered list of 39,419 words. You see that place as a rank: lower means closer, and 1 is the answer. The ranking is calculated ahead of time, so the same word always gets the same rank for a given puzzle.

The dictionary mainly reflects American English. Regional accents can make some results feel surprising. A rank is the game's comparison of dictionary pronunciations, not a judgment of how you speak.

Choosing the daily word

Answers come from commonly used English words. Daily answers exclude words with another word that sounds exactly the same, words with multiple dictionary pronunciations, proper-name entries, and words on an English profanity blocklist. The game also checks word length and how many rhyming neighbors a possible answer has.

Monday and Tuesday favor familiar answers with more rhyming neighbors. Toward the weekend, answers become less familiar and have fewer neighbors. You still get unlimited pings on every day.

Made to be played a little every day

Guest progress stays in your browser. You can close the tab and come back to the same puzzle. The next word arrives at midnight in your local time.

The name is pronounced foh-NEE-mo. For the complete instructions, read How to play. To reach the people behind the game, visit Contact.

Sources

The word data comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and the FrequencyWords English list. Answer selection uses Princeton WordNet and the LDNOOBW English blocklist. These open resources make the daily puzzle possible.