🔠 Word Trail
Trace words through touching letters. Longer chains score far more.
GRID
SCORE 0BEST 0WORDS 0TIME 0
How to play Word Trail
- A grid of letters is dealt at the start of each round.
- Drag through touching letters — sideways, up, down or diagonally — to spell a word.
- Letters must be adjacent and no square may be used twice in the same word.
- Longer words score sharply more. Three minutes on the clock.
- When time is up you are shown how many words the grid actually held.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click and drag | Trace a word |
| Touch and drag | Trace on mobile |
| Enter | Submit the traced word |
| Backspace | Clear the current trace |
| R | Shuffle the same letters |
| F | Enter or leave full screen |
| Esc | Leave full screen |
Tips & strategy
- Hunt for common endings first. Sweeping the grid for -ING, -ED and -ERS turns short finds into long ones.
- Plurals are free points. If a word scores and there is an S touching its last letter, take it.
- Work outward from vowel clusters — a corner with three vowels around it usually anchors several words.
- Do not stall on one long word. Ten four-letter words beat one eight-letter word you never quite find.
Frequently asked questions
Which words are accepted?
A list of over twenty-six thousand common English words of three to eight letters, built by cross-checking a frequency-ranked corpus against a validated dictionary, so ordinary words count and obscure filler does not.
How is a word scored?
Scoring rises steeply with length: three letters earn one point, four earn two, five earn four, six earn seven, seven earn eleven, and eight or more earn sixteen.
Can I reuse a letter square?
Not within the same word. You may use the same square again in a different word, and the same letter appearing twice in the grid counts as two separate squares.