Just for fun, and nothing sent anywhere
Free daily word games, made to be played in a spare five minutes. Everything happens in your browser.
Back to the gamesPrivacy
- No accounts, no cookies and no adverts. Your progress, stats and streaks are kept in your own browser (its local storage) and never leave your device. Clearing your browsing data clears them.
- Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not follow you from site to site: it sees which page was opened, the browser and roughly which country, not who you are (how it works).
- The "Support me" button shows Ko-fi's donation form, but only when you press it. Until then nothing is loaded from Ko-fi, and once you open it Ko-fi's privacy policy applies to that form.
- After a Lost for Words, Shelf Scramble, Retitled or Cipher puzzle there is a link to buy the book on Amazon. It is an ordinary link: nothing is loaded from Amazon unless you follow it. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
- The answers at the end of a puzzle link to their entries in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Again, nothing is loaded from it unless you follow a link.
The books in Lost for Words and Cipher
The lines in Lost for Words and Cipher come from these novels, all in the public domain. The texts were taken from Project Gutenberg; thank you to its volunteers.
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
- Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Silas Marner by George Eliot
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The word list
If it's not in the list, it's not a word. Every game uses the same list: British English words from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists) by Kevin Atkinson, at size 50, without proper nouns, abbreviations or offensive words.
Keyboard
Just start typing: letters go straight into the word box. Enter submits a word and Backspace deletes a letter. The on-screen keyboard works too.
Supporting the site
The site is free and has no ads. If you enjoy it, you can buy me a coffee with the "Support me" button. Thank you!
Credits
Fonts: Figtree, Young Serif and DM Sans, all under the SIL Open Font License. Word list: SCOWL, © Kevin Atkinson, used under its permissive licence. Sentences: public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg.
Made by
Matt McQueen, who also writes the Matt Rarely Writes blog and makes the card games.
The code is open source under the MIT licence: see it on GitHub. Suggestions and bug reports are welcome there.