Connect two words that have nothing to do with each other.
Every day you get two words that have nothing to do with each other, and your job is to connect them by typing words in between, judged on meaning rather than spelling. If two words mean close enough things, a line appears between them, and when an unbroken line of them runs from one end to the other, you've solved it.
Play today's puzzle →Say your two anchors are BREAD and DESERT. They score 33.6% against each other, which is under the bar, so there's no line and no shortcut. You have to go through something.
BREAD and GRAIN score 52.2%. GRAIN and SAND score 56.7%, because both are small loose stuff you measure by the handful. SAND and DESERT score 63.8%. Two typed words and a food is connected to a place. Those are the real scores; you can type the chain into a board and watch them come up.
Every line carries the score of the pair it joins, to one decimal place. That number is the whole feedback loop: 38% means you were nearly there, 12% means you are in the wrong part of the language.
While your two halves are still apart, a dotted line stretches between whichever pair is currently closest across the gap, with its score attached. That number is how you tell whether you are getting closer.
Tap or click any word and the board switches to a focus view: every other word shows what it scores against the one you picked. The Connections list is the same thing in readable rows, one card per word.
A hint hands you one word that sits on a route that actually works, plus its definition. Opening a hint you've already been given is free forever, so there's no reason to memorise it or rush. Getting a fresh word is the part that costs.
Usually because you solved it. There's no clock, no wrong-guess penalty, and typing something that isn't an English word gets bounced before it lands, so typos are free.
The one other ending is a full board. Fifty words is the cap, and if you fill it without joining the anchors the puzzle stops, because there's nowhere left to put anything. Most solves use a handful of words, so it is rare. If you manage it you can clear the board and start the same puzzle again.
| Shortest path | The fewest links this puzzle can be solved in, also called par. |
|---|---|
| Words used | How many you put on the board getting there. |
| Hints | How many words you had handed to you. |
| Streak | Days solved in a row. Miss one and it's back to zero. |
Solve it and the winning chain lights up one word at a time, then the Solved window offers a share summary: your chain as coloured squares plus those four numbers. It never includes the words, so you can post it without spoiling anything.
Work from both ends. Starting at one anchor and marching toward the other means every guess has to be right in sequence. Put a word next to each anchor instead and the question becomes "which of these two piles is closer to the other", which is a much easier question.
The arithmetic is steep. At the current bar each word connects to roughly 28 others, so everything three steps out from one anchor is about 28 cubed, north of twenty thousand words. Two searches of a step and a half each are two piles of about 150.
Typos are free, bad words aren't. Anything that isn't a real English word gets bounced before it reaches the board, so a misspelling costs you nothing at all. A real word that fails to connect still takes one of your 50 slots, so the care belongs in choosing rather than typing.
Steer by the dotted number. Play a word and watch what it does. Up means you moved toward the far anchor and the neighbours of that word are worth trying. Unchanged means you landed somewhere irrelevant to the crossing, however nicely it connected to your own side.
Aim for the middle of the ladder. DACHSHUND connects to almost nothing. THING connects to almost everything, which sounds useful until you notice it points nowhere in particular. The words that actually cross ground are things like GRAIN, MARKET, SIGNAL: broad enough to reach, specific enough to have a direction.
Do the swap test. Before you type, ask whether your word could replace the board word you're aiming at, in a normal sentence, and leave it standing. Words that pass tend to connect. Words that just share a subject usually don't, and that gap is the single biggest source of wasted guesses.
Know when to quit a line. A good region keeps producing words that connect to each other, which feels like progress without being any closer to the far anchor. If you are ten words deep and the dotted number has not moved, go to the far anchor and play something directly off it. Switching costs one guess.
Do not lean on umbrella nouns. SOMETHING, ITEM and ACTIVITY each sit close to between 15% and 28% of the whole vocabulary, so they stick to nearly anything. The generator keeps them off the route it measures par against, so a solve routed through one scores badly and makes every puzzle feel the same.
Every puzzle has its own address. Numbering starts at #1 on 1 July 2026 and goes
up by one a day, so networds.app/?game=26 opens puzzle 26. The
address bar always shows whatever board you're on, and the Solved window has a
Copy link button for sending someone the exact puzzle you just
finished.
The daily puzzle is free, guesses are unlimited, and you don't need an account. There are optional purchases: a subscription that opens the full archive of past puzzles, and colour palettes sold once each. Neither is required to play.
It came in under 40% against everything on the board. "Similar" here means "used the same way", not "about the same subject", and those two come apart hard. All three of these are hospital words:
| Pair | Score | Connects? |
|---|---|---|
| DOCTOR and SURGEON | 74.0% | Yes |
| DOCTOR and NURSE | 59.8% | Yes |
| DOCTOR and STETHOSCOPE | 28.1% | No |
The two you can swap into the same sentence sail through and the one you can't gets nowhere near, so running that swap test before you type is the cheapest habit here.
A language model does it. Nobody wrote these scores down, and there's no list of related words behind the game. The model read an enormous amount of English and kept track of the company each word keeps, which turns every word into a point in a space with several hundred dimensions. The score you see is the angle between two of those points: 100% for pointing the same way, 0% for unrelated.
So it has no idea what bread is. It only knows what people say around the word, which is where the surprising scores come from.
It looks like a bug and it isn't. LOUD and QUIET score 76.2%. BUY and SELL, 74.8%. HOT and COLD, 53.5%. Opposites are the most swappable words in the language: same slot, same subject, same words either side. "The water was hot" and "the water was cold" are one sentence with one change.
Worth exploiting: when a chain is stuck, the opposite of a word already on the board is one of the most reliable moves available.
Sometimes there is no explanation. WASHY and PUSHY connect at 42.5% because the
model chops words into pieces and those two share the y ending, so
half their raw material is identical. HAVEN and HAVE score 77.3%
and I have no explanation at all. It's a spot where the model's map of English is
just wrong, and there's no principle behind it I can point at.
Before you decide it just likes similar spellings, though: FLOWER and FLOUR score 39.6%, BATTLE and CATTLE 30.6%, RIVER and DRIVER 25.2%, and none of those connect. Lookalikes are usually fine; it is shared endings that cause trouble.
Because it was measured. The bar doesn't just settle individual pairs, it decides how dense the whole graph is, and that decides how long the shortest route is. At 40% each word connects to roughly 28 others and par sits around 3. At 50% that drops to about 7.5 connections and a solve runs to around 11 words. At 55% it breaks outright: 27% of anchor words end up with no route at all.
The higher bars are not harder in a way skill can beat. They are harder in a way that feels broken, where you type something any human would call similar and nothing happens.
Only by filling all 50 slots without joining the anchors. Hard to do by accident.
No. Progress, stats and settings sit in your browser. Signing in only exists so a purchase follows you between devices, and the Privacy Policy spells out exactly what that stores.
Every day, with its own number and its own permanent link.
Yes. The archive lists past days and any puzzle opens from its link. Today's is always available.
Yes, and you can install it to your home screen as a web app. Same puzzle either way.
A program builds one every night out of a curated word list and that same language model. Nobody writes them by hand. About NetWords walks through how, including why the model is frozen at one version.
Play today's puzzle →