Contexto starting words

The candidates were common concrete words already in the list: music, house, water, ocean, and the rest of that set. For each candidate, the rank was computed against 80 secret words from the puzzle pool. When the candidate was itself the secret, that pair was skipped so a free rank of 1 would not flatter it.

The figure on each card is the arithmetic mean of those ranks, rounded to the nearest integer. Lower is better. These are not a claim about every possible opener, only about the words that were scored. A hub word sits somewhat near many topics, which is why its mean beats 2,501.

After the opener, follow the category the closest guesses share. If you want a single neighbor instead of an opener, use a hint. The daily board is on play.