Shoale

How to play Shoale

Shoale is a free daily word game. Everyone gets the same hidden word each day, and you have eight casts to find it.

Each cast is a word. Shoale shows its rank: how close it is in meaning to the hidden word, out of about 18,000 common English words. Rank #1 is the word itself, #2 is its closest neighbour, and so on. Closer casts catch bigger fish:

• 🐋 #1: the day's legendary catch
• 🦈 #2 to #10: trophy fish
• 🐠 #11 to #50: big ones
• 🐟 #51 to #300: keepers
• 🦐 #301 to #1,000: small fry
• 🥾 #1,001 and beyond: junk

You start with two hints: the day's theme, shown as "Today's water", and a free sonar ping, one word already plotted on the radar. On the radar, only the distance from the centre matters.

How is "close in meaning" measured?

Shoale ranks words with word embeddings from two published language models, GloVe and fastText, trained on billions of words of text. Words that show up in similar contexts end up close together, so ocean sits near sea and coast. Now and then the models connect words in ways a dictionary wouldn't, which is part of the game.

Questions

When is there a new puzzle?

Every day at midnight in your own time zone.

Is Shoale free?

Yes. There's no account and nothing to install. Your progress, stats and fishdex are saved in your browser.

Do plurals and verb forms count?

Yes. Boats counts as boat, and ran counts as run. Unknown words and repeats don't use up a cast.

Is Shoale like Semantle or Contexto?

It's the same kind of game: you guess by meaning, not spelling. Shoale gives you eight casts instead of unlimited guesses, a daily theme, and a fishing log of everything you catch.