The Field Guide · Nearle
How to play Nearle — guess the hidden word by meaning
What is Nearle?
Nearle is duplixo’s free daily semantic word game: there is one hidden word each day, and you guess it by meaning, not spelling. Every guess comes back with a closeness rank — rank 1 is the answer, and the lower the number, the warmer you are. No guess limit, no sign-up, no emoji, and an unlimited practice mode when you want more.
A free daily game you solve by meaning
Most word games ask you to find the right letters. Nearle asks you to find the right idea. There is a new hidden word every day, shared by everyone, and your job is to reach it by guessing words that mean something similar. You are not spelling anything out; you are homing in on a concept. When the daily word is done, an unlimited practice mode sets a fresh secret word whenever you want another round.
Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — a single input box, a tidy ranked list of your guesses, a plain-text result you can copy, and zero emoji anywhere in the experience.
Because guesses are scored by meaning rather than by shape, length never matters. A three-letter word and a ten-letter word are judged on exactly the same footing: how close each one sits, in sense, to the day’s answer. That is what makes Nearle feel different from a letter game — you are thinking in synonyms, categories and associations, not in vowels and consonants.
The day’s word is the same for every player and rolls over at midnight. Solve it and your streak ticks up; come back tomorrow to keep it alive. When you finish you can copy a compact plain-text result — how many guesses it took and your warmest near-misses — without spoiling the word for anyone you send it to. There is no timer, so nobody is pushed to rush; Nearle rewards a patient read of the ranks over raw speed.
How Nearle works
The goal is to find one hidden word, and there is no limit on how many guesses you take. Type any word and press Enter. Instead of colouring letters, Nearle returns a single number — a closeness rank — that tells you how near your word is, in meaning, to the answer:
Rank 1 is the answer itself. Rank 2 is the second-closest word in meaning, rank 3 the third-closest, and so on, all the way out to roughly 6,000 for the words that share almost nothing with the answer. The lower the number, the warmer you are. So a guess that comes back at rank 12 is very close; one that comes back at rank 4,500 is a long way off.
The ranking is worked out ahead of time from a pre-trained word-meaning model — a word-embedding that places every word as a point in a space of meaning, so that words used in similar ways sit near each other. Nearle measures the distance from each vocabulary word to the day’s answer, sorts them, and stores the result as a fixed table. That is why “sea” scores near “ocean” while “table” does not: synonyms and related ideas land near the top, and unrelated words land in the thousands. Every player sees the identical ranking, and each guess is an instant lookup.
| Rank | What it means |
|---|---|
| 1 | The answer — you have found the word. |
| 2–25 | Red hot: a very close synonym or a sibling of the answer. |
| 26–150 | Warm: the same topic, and you are closing in. |
| 151–800 | Mild: the right neighbourhood, but not the right idea yet. |
| 801–6,000 | Cold: largely unrelated in meaning — change tack. |
A few details are worth knowing. Nearle scores a fixed vocabulary of about 6,000 words; if you try something outside it, you will see a “not in the word list” message rather than a rank — more on that below. Spelling and word length are irrelevant to the score, though your word does have to be spelled correctly to be recognised. And because there is no timer and no guess cap, Nearle rewards careful, patient triangulation over speed.
One solve, read rank by rank
The daily word is hidden, so let us invent one purely to show the method. Suppose — for illustration only — the answer is VIOLIN. Here is how a sensible run of guesses might score, and what each rank would tell you:
| Guess | Rank | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| ANIMAL | 4,120 | Cold. Wrong theme entirely — abandon this direction. |
| OBJECT | 1,880 | Still cold, but a shade warmer: it is a thing, not a creature. |
| MUSIC | 240 | A big drop — you have turned warm. The word lives in the world of music. |
| INSTRUMENT | 38 | Hot. Now you know it is a musical instrument, not a genre or a sound. |
| GUITAR | 9 | Very hot. A specific instrument — try close cousins. |
| VIOLIN | 1 | Found it. Rank 1 is the answer. |
Notice the shape of the solve. The first two guesses are deliberately broad — they are not trying to win, only to find the right region of meaning. The jump from OBJECT (1,880) to MUSIC (240) is the moment that matters: a large drop in rank is the game telling you that you have turned warm and should push in that direction. From there you triangulate, narrowing from a whole field (music) to a category (instrument) to a specific example (guitar), and the ranks tighten from 240 to 38 to 9. Once you are that close, walking to a near cousin — guitar to violin — lands on rank 1. That is the whole game: read the gradient, follow the warmth, close in.
Nearle vs Wordle, and Nearle vs Contexto
If you have played Wordle, the honest way to explain Nearle is by the difference between them. Wordle is about letters: a fixed five-letter target, scored position by position, solved in six tries. Nearle is about meaning: a word of any length, scored by how close each guess sits in sense, solved in as many guesses as you need. In Wordle a near-miss shares letters with the answer; in Nearle a near-miss shares an idea with it. Neither is harder in the abstract — they simply exercise different halves of your vocabulary.
| Feature | Nearle | Wordle |
|---|---|---|
| What you match | Meaning of the word | Letters and positions |
| Feedback on a guess | A closeness rank (1–~6,000) | Green / amber / grey tiles |
| Word length | Any length | Exactly five letters |
| Guess limit | None | Six tries |
| Cost to play | Free, always | Free daily puzzle |
| Unlimited practice | Yes, no streak pressure | Limited |
| Account or sign-in | Not needed | Account to sync stats |
| Emoji in the interface | None | Emoji share grid |
The closest well-known relative to Nearle is Contexto, which popularised the daily “guess the word by meaning, ranked by closeness” format. Nearle is our own independent, original-code take on that idea: our own word-meaning ranking, our own vocabulary, our own interface, hints and practice mode. We describe Nearle as a Contexto-style game so you know what to expect, but duplixo is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Contexto. If you enjoy that style of semantic puzzle, Nearle is our free, no-sign-up version of it.
Wordle is a trademark of The New York Times Company and Contexto is a product of its respective owner. duplixo is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by either; the names are used here only descriptively, to explain the kind of game Nearle is.
Want to solve in fewer guesses?
Nearle, frequently asked
Is Nearle free?
Yes. Nearle is completely free to play. There is no paywall, no premium tier and no charge for the daily puzzle or for unlimited practice rounds. Open it in any modern browser and start guessing straight away.
How is Nearle different from Wordle?
Wordle is a spelling puzzle: you match letters and positions in a five-letter word. Nearle is a meaning puzzle: you guess whole words of any length and each is scored by how close it is in meaning to the hidden word, shown as a closeness rank. In Nearle the letters do not matter at all — only the sense of the word.
Is Nearle the same as Contexto?
Nearle is our own free, no-sign-up take on the Contexto-style semantic guessing game, built with original code and an independent word-meaning ranking. duplixo is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Contexto; we describe the game that way only so you know what to expect.
Why does it say my word is “not in the word list”?
Nearle ranks a fixed vocabulary of about 6,000 common words. Very rare words, proper nouns, hyphenated forms and unusual inflections may fall outside it, so they cannot be scored. If a word is rejected, try a more common base form of the same idea — a plainer synonym usually gets through.
Is there a limit on guesses, and can I play more than once a day?
There is no guess limit — the game is about triangulating from your warmest guesses, so guess as many times as you need. Alongside the one daily word there is an unlimited practice mode that sets a fresh hidden word whenever you want another round, without touching your daily streak.
Do I need an account to play Nearle?
No account, sign-up or email is required. Your streak and statistics are stored locally in your own browser, so you can play immediately and privately without handing over any personal details.
Know the rules? Play today’s word.
Most of the work in a semantic word game happens in the first handful of guesses, before you have found the theme. A good opening sweep of broad category words tells you which region of meaning to search, so the rest of the solve becomes triangulation rather than guesswork. Learn to read the rank gradient — especially the big drop that signals you have turned warm — and a tidy solve stops feeling like luck.
Our companion guide lays out a repeatable method for guessing by meaning: which broad words to open with, how to triangulate from your two or three warmest guesses, how to walk synonym chains and try different parts of speech, and the common mistakes that quietly cost you guesses. If you only read one more thing, read that. See the Nearle strategy guide, or jump straight in and play today’s Nearle.