Find the words hiding in the grid.

Four things worth knowing

• 1

  Trace a word, then bank it

  Tap a letter, then any letter touching it, and keep going. The trail shows where you have been; the tick lights up as soon as the word is real and new. The board quietens while you trace so the trail stays readable.

  
• 2

  Everyone gets the same board

  One puzzle a day, dealt from the date, identical worldwide. Comparing scores means something because you both played the same letters.

• 3

  Two puzzles, two difficulties

  Elementary uses gentler words and counts anything from two letters up. Standard uses the full everyday dictionary and counts four letters or more. Finishing either one keeps your streak.

• 4

  Help is free

  The shading, the per-square counts and the direction hint all work on the daily and always will. A hinted word costs you half a word on the score, and nothing else.

Which words count depends on where you are

British and American spellings are different dictionaries, not one dictionary with exceptions. Pick the region that matches how you spell and the board is judged against that list.

Elementary and Standard are the two free dailies. Competition is the tournament-sized list, and it is one of the add-ons below.

The daily is free. Three things you can add.

Both daily puzzles are free, every day, with no account to make. So is all the help: the shading, the per-square counts and the direction hint work on the daily and always will. There is no advertising, nothing to subscribe to, and no sign-in.

If you want more than one board a day, there are three add-ons. Each is bought once and kept — there is no subscription and they do not expire.

• Custom Puzzles

  Unlock

  Your own board, your own rules: play whenever you like rather than waiting for tomorrow, and adjust the difficulty to suit you.

• Dictionaries

  Unlock

  Adds Competition, the tournament-sized word list above — about 172,000 words against Standard's 60,000.

• Themes

  Unlock

  Choose the colour of the board and the font of its letters.

What you cannot buy is an advantage on the daily. Everyone plays the same board with the same help available, which is the only way comparing scores means anything.

Tell us what you think

Anything at all: what you enjoy, what irritates you, what you wish it did. And if the dictionary got a word wrong, report that too. Either on its own is fine, or both together — it is one form.

Enjoying it? A rating on Google Play helps more than anything else you could do for us. The link will appear here once the app is live on the store.

What the game and this site collect

The app sends one thing: your daily score, anonymously

When you finish a daily puzzle, the app sends the result to this site so it can tell you whether you finished in the top 5, 10 or 25% of players. What is sent is the puzzle number, your region, how many words you found and how many of them used a hint, how many words the board had, your score, the app's version number, and a random code made up for that one game so that it is only counted once. The code is different for every game, so your results cannot be linked to each other, to your device or to you. There are no accounts, and nothing else leaves your phone.

You can turn this off in the app under Settings & Themes → Compare with other players. When it is off, nothing is sent at all and no ranking is shown.

To stop anyone flooding the rankings with made-up scores, the site keeps a one-way hash of your IP address for one hour after a result arrives, then deletes it. The hash is never stored with the result, and it cannot be turned back into an IP address.

Everything else stays on your own device: your puzzles, your progress, your streak and your history. There are no analytics, no advertising and no third-party software development kits in the app. The only Android permission it asks for is internet access, which it uses only to send the score described above. Uninstalling the app deletes everything it stored on your phone.

This website collects what you type into the form above

If you send feedback or a word report, we store what you typed: your feedback, and for a word report the word, what you said was wrong with it, the region and dictionary you chose, and the puzzle number and note if you gave them. We store your email address only if you chose to leave one. We keep all of it so we can act on it, and we use an email address only to reply to you about what you sent.

To stop the form being abused we also store a one-way hash of your IP address and your browser's user-agent string. The hash cannot be turned back into an IP address. Reports are deleted once they have been dealt with.

Nothing on this site is shared or sold, and there are no tracking or advertising cookies. The page loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means Google sees the request for the font files.

Google Play

If you install WordEke from Google Play, Google collects its own data about the installation under its own privacy policy. That is between you and Google; nothing about it reaches us.

Getting in touch

To ask what we hold about you, or to have it deleted, email [email protected].