A daily puzzle to find the longest hidden word in the fewest guesses. Tap letters left to right across the grid, skipping any you like, to spell words.
Shoale
Fish for today's hidden word. You have 8 guesses: the closer you are, the rarer the fish you reel up. Can you get today's legendary catch?
What is Shoale?
Shoale is a free daily word game in which players try to identify a hidden word by guessing other words close to it in meaning. Each day everyone gets the same target word, and the game ranks each guess by semantic closeness, with #1 being the hidden word itself. The presentation wraps this in a fishing theme: closer guesses correspond to rarer, larger fish.
Editor takes
Eight casts is a tight leash for a meaning-based hunt, but the two-model ranking keeps the distance metric honest.
A daily puzzle that measures words by sense, not spelling, and makes you fish for the phrase—deliciously cunning.
How to play Shoale
You have eight casts (guesses) to find the hidden word. Before guessing, you're given a theme for the day and a sonar ping: one word already plotted on a radar showing its rank. Enter a word to see its rank; lower numbers are closer in meaning to the target, and each rank corresponds to a catch size from junk to legendary.
Tips & strategy
- Start with the daily theme and the sonar ping word; the theme narrows the area, and the ping gives you a reference rank.
- Use rank feedback to move closer: if a guess is #100, try synonyms and related concepts; if it's #1,500, change direction.
- Plurals and verb forms are normalized to their base form, so trying 'boats' after 'boat' won't give new information; use a different word instead.
- Unknown words and repeats don't consume a cast, so you can safely probe with uncommon words without losing an attempt.
- With only eight casts, choose broad, high-level terms first before narrowing down with specific examples.
Frequently asked questions
When does the daily puzzle reset?
Every day at midnight in your own time zone.
Is Shoale free to play?
Yes. There is no account and nothing to install; progress, stats, and fishdex are saved in your browser.
Do plurals and verb forms count as separate guesses?
No. Plurals and verb forms are treated as their base forms (e.g., boats counts as boat, ran counts as run).
How is 'close in meaning' measured?
Shoale ranks words using word embeddings from two published language models, GloVe and fastText, which place words with similar contexts near each other.
What happens if I guess an unknown word or repeat a word?
Unknown words and repeats don't use up a cast, so your eight guesses are only spent on valid, new words.
Where to play
Play Shoaleshoale.xyz · free, new puzzle daily
Keep your curiosity going
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