About ItWord

ItWord is a free daily word game where rare words score big. Most word puzzles reward you for finding the answer; ItWord rewards you for finding an unusual one. The more uncommon the words you think of, the higher you score.

How it works

A new six-letter ItWord goes live every day at midnight UK time, and it's the same puzzle for everyone. Over six rounds you enter one word per round, each starting and ending on neighbouring letters of the ItWord and one letter longer than the last, from three letters up to eight. Every valid word completes its round, so you'll always finish, but how many points you take home depends on how rare your words are, how many misses you make and how long you take.

The full guide covers every rule, with a worked example.

How words are scored

Each word's rarity comes from how often it appears in English text, measured in the Google Books Ngram dataset. For every round, all the words that fit are ranked against each other, so a word scores well when it's rarer than the other options for that round, not just rare in general. The rarest words of all earn a star.

Definitions for each day's ItWord come from the Datamuse API.

Leaderboards, streaks and past answers

You can play without an account. With a free account your games go on the daily leaderboard, and your profile keeps track of your streak, stats and best words. Once a day is over, its ItWord and leaderboard are open to everyone in the archive, alongside the words players entered most in each round.