Skip to the puzzles
Gridword Houseword puzzles, floor by floor
EN
  1. Home
  2. About the house

About the house

Gridword House is a small website of word puzzles that you play in the browser. There are six games — Word Search, Word Wheel, Mystery Word, Word Ladder, Word Scramble and Criss-Cross — each with 45 numbered rooms on three floors, and a daily house of three puzzles. Every page exists in English, Italian, Hungarian and Finnish, and every puzzle is built from word lists of its own language.

How the puzzles are made

Puzzles are generated by a program and checked as they are generated. A word search must contain each listed word exactly once. A criss-cross grid must have exactly one solution, found by a solver that tries every arrangement. A ladder's par is the true shortest path over all accepted words. A scramble's letters must form exactly one word. A word wheel must list every accepted word you could spell from it, either in the grid or as a bonus word.

The numbered rooms are built once and are the same for everyone, which is why you can talk about room #214 with a friend. The daily house is fixed per date. Nothing about you is used to choose a puzzle.

What we do not do

There are no accounts, no adverts, no tracking scripts and no outside services on this site. Your progress — lit rooms, the room you left unfinished, your run of days — lives in your browser's local storage. See the privacy page for details.

Credits for the word lists

Every language in the house stands on open data. We filtered and reshaped it; what we ship keeps the original licences:

  • English: SCOWL (Kevin Atkinson) and wordfreq (Robyn Speer, CC BY-SA 4.0).
  • Italian: Morph-it! (Marco Baroni, Eros Zanchetta, CC BY-SA 2.0 / LGPL), Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0) and wordfreq (CC BY-SA 4.0).
  • Hungarian: Magyar Ispell (László Németh, Ferenc Godó, MPL 2.0 / LGPL), Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0) and wordfreq (CC BY-SA 4.0).
  • Finnish: Nykysuomen sanalista from Kotus, the Institute for the Languages of Finland (CC BY 4.0), ranked with Yle Uutisten taajuussanakirja, compiled by Daniel Radice from Yle news text (CC BY 4.0).
  • Filtering: the LDNOOBW lists of offensive words (CC BY 4.0) plus our own blocklist.

The English, Italian and Hungarian lists are therefore distributed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (Hungarian also under MPL 2.0 / LGPL 3+), the Finnish lists under CC BY 4.0. The themed lists for Word Search were written for the site.

Contact

Spotted a word that has no business in a family puzzle, or a room that will not solve? The contact page has our address.