How to play Weaver

Weaver gives you a start word and an end word with the same number of letters. You build a ladder between them, one word at a time.

• Each new word must differ from the word above it in exactly one position. You cannot add, remove or rearrange letters.
• Every word must be in the game's word list: ordinary English words, including plurals and verb forms, but no proper names or abbreviations.
• You win when you type the end word. Being one letter away is not enough; the end word itself is your final move.
• You can use as many moves as you need. The aim is to match the optimal number, the length of the shortest possible ladder.

That is the whole game. The rest of this page shows how the board works and walks through four example ladders, from a straight run to a puzzle that needs two detours.

The start word is the top row and the end word is the bottom row; both have their own color so you can always tell them apart from your own words. Between them are the words you have entered, and below those is the row where you type.

A tile turns green when its letter already matches the end word in the same position. In a four-letter puzzle, three green tiles mean your next word can be the end word itself. The letter you changed in each step is marked, which makes it easy to retrace your ladder.

Type on your keyboard or tap the on-screen keys. Enter submits the word and Backspace deletes a letter. If a word is rejected, a short message tells you why: it is not in the word list, it changes more than one letter, or it changes none. Rejected words never count as moves.

Changed your mind about an earlier step? Tap any word you entered to remove it together with every word below it, or use Undo to take back the last change. Removed words do not count against you.

Each word you enter is one move, and the end word counts as the last one. The start word is free. When you finish, the result screen shows:

• your number of moves and the optimal number for the puzzle;
• one optimal ladder, so you can see a shortest route even if you found a different one;
• how many hints you used.

Repeating a word is allowed, but it is never free: going back to a word you already used adds moves without getting you closer. Your statistics record how far above the optimal you finish (exactly optimal, one move over, two over and so on), which is a better measure of progress than simply solving.

LOSE and FIND differ in all four positions, so the ladder needs at least four moves. This one uses exactly four, and every move turns one more tile green:

LONE places the N, LINE places the I, FINE places the F and FIND finishes. When the start and end words have their vowels and consonants in the same positions, as here, a straight run like this is often possible. The order matters, though: changing the L first would need FOSE, and changing the E first would need LOSD, and neither is a word.

HOME and WORK already share the O, so only three letters need to change. Yet there is no three-move ladder: WOME, HORE and HOMK are not words, so you cannot fix any letter from the very first step. The shortest ladder spends one move on a letter that does not appear in WORK at all:

COME is the setup move. It looks like a step sideways, but it leads to CORE, and CORE leads to WORE and WORK. If you count three differences but cannot find a word that fixes any of them, look for a sideways step like this one.

HAND and FOOT differ in every position, so the minimum is four moves, but the shortest ladder actually takes five:

The first letter changes twice, from H to B and later from B to F. That extra move is the price of reaching BOND, the word that switches the vowel from A to O. Lewis Carroll's own example from 1879, HEAD to TAIL, works the same way: the third letter changes twice. Whenever a ladder needs exactly one move more than the number of differences, one of the differing letters has to change twice, as the first letter of HOME did on its way to the W of WORK.

Five-letter puzzles follow the same rules with longer words. SLEEP and DREAM differ in four positions, and the shortest ladder takes six moves:

Here two positions change twice. The first letter goes from S to B and then to D, and the last letter goes from P to D and then to M. The consonant pairs do most of the work: SL becomes BL, BL becomes BR, and BR becomes DR, one letter at a time. Words in the middle of the ladder, such as BLEED and BREED, are not related to either end word, and that is normal. You can try five-letter puzzles in the five-letter daily or in Unlimited.

If you are stuck, the hint button fills in the next word of a shortest ladder from your current last word. It does not restart the puzzle or undo your detours; it simply shows the best next step from where you are. Each hint is counted and appears in your result and in the text you share, so you can always tell an unaided solve from an assisted one.

The daily puzzle changes at midnight in your local time zone and is the same for everyone on that date. Solving it on consecutive days builds a streak. Unlimited gives you a new puzzle whenever you press New game, and every Unlimited puzzle has a link you can share. If you missed a day, the archive in the top bar of the daily game lets you play earlier puzzles; they count as played but leave your streak alone. Ready to go further? The tips page covers strategy in detail.