Hunt alone or team up to discover today’s political secret word. Guess random words, then test your semantic hunches. “Sometimes easy, often hard, always surprising!”
FAQs
Think of a secret word hunt as a linguistic game of battleship. After a new secret word loads at 8pm EST daily, you have 24 hours to home in on the word based on the proximity rankings of your various guesses.
The day's secret word has a proximity ranking of 1, and rankings descend to >100,000. Proximity rankings are based on a 300-vector semantic analysis of how three million distinct words appear in a portion of the Google News dataset (100 billion word corpus!) as analyzed by Google's Word2Vec algorithm and represented by David Turner with modifications by Racery’s software team.
Antonyms often have similar proximity because of the parallel semantic role each plays in the corpus. An example from a hunt for the secret word “easy”...
Many are straight from PoliticalDictionary.com. To keep things lively, we’ve also sprinkled in some politics-adjacent words like “winner” or “rights.”
Every word’s permutations sit at different intersections of vectors and, apparently, keep very different semantic company.
First-time hunters can ask for a hint immediately. In your subsequent hunts, a hint is offered after ten consecutive guesses fall outside the top 1,000 words.
There are plenty of quirks buried in Google’s 100-billion-word corpus. Some obscure words seem to stem from British news sources. Others may have only been used a few times, but always in correlation with the day's secret word. For a sense of these oddities, peek at words 100-1,000 in the “closest 1,000” list for secret words like “summaries” and “valid.” (BTW, we’ve weeded out all the misspellings, which are remarkably abundant.)
Yes! Partnering makes the hunt easier and definitely more fun. Just share your hunt’s distinct URL with a friend or family member. If you both create nicknames, your team can compete with individual hunters in the leaderboard.
Sometimes taking a break helps and a night of sleep can help even more. Here are some other tips, though none of them are foolproof!
After a few hunts, maybe you’ll notice how persistently your brain slips into ruts, how vigorously it refuses to back out of conceptual dead ends. Maybe you’ll devise some strategies to evade the power of confirmation biases in your life beyond these hunts!