ContextoHow to play Contexto
You guess words. Each accepted guess gets a rank. Rank 1 is the secret word, and a smaller rank is a closer context. You can guess as many times as you want.
Find the secret word. You have unlimited guesses.
After submitting a word, you will see its position. The secret word is number 1.
What the rank measures
The public game says its algorithm analyzed thousands of texts and used the context around words to measure similarity. This site does the same job with a published model. MiniLM (Wang and colleagues, 2020) is a distilled transformer. Each list word is the mean of its token vectors, normalized, then projected with a fixed Gaussian matrix from 384 dimensions to 64. Cosine similarity sorts the list. The method sits in the same family as Sentence-BERT (Reimers and Gurevych, 2019): distance in the vector space stands in for distance in usage.
The list has 5,000 lowercase English words, taken from the Google 10,000 no-swears frequency list and filtered to letters only. Rank 1 is always the secret, because a normalized vector matches itself. A random legal guess has an expected rank near 2,501.
If the secret word were music, these guesses would land here.
- song22
- sound3
- river912
- salt3,016
A turn
Type a word. One word, no spaces. If it is missing from the list, nothing is added.
Read the color. Green is close, amber is mid-list, red is far. The color follows the logarithm of the rank, so the jump from 10 to 40 matters more than the jump from 2,000 to 2,500.
Narrow the topic. When several guesses cluster, name the thing they have in common, then a more specific word inside it. Synonyms of a red guess rarely help.
Hints and giving up
Hint reveals the word at rank 1200, 600, 300, 120, 40, 12 in that order, skipping any word you already have. Give up places the secret on the board at rank 1. Neither action changes yesterday's puzzle. The clock is midnight in New York, and puzzle 1 was 1 January 2024.
This board is independent of contexto.me. Matching their rules does not mean matching their secret word. If you need this site's word, it is covered on contexto answer today. If you want a neighbor instead, start with hints.
Questions
How many guesses do I get?
Unlimited. A guess counts only when the word is in the list. Hints are marked on the row and are not included in the solved-in count.
Why can two unrelated words still get a mid rank?
The vectors come from a general language model, then a projection down to 64 dimensions. Some neighborhoods are fuzzy, especially for short or very common words.