This Wordle alternative is impossibly hard

Just when it seemed that the likes of Absurdle and Octordle had reached the limits of how difficult Wordle alternatives could get, along comes something to have you tearing your hair out all over again. 

Semantle dispatches with the usual guesses based on spelling, and instead has you guessing a word based on semantic similarity. Which is to say how likely a word is to be used in similar contexts. 

For every word you guess, Semantle will tell you whether you’re hot or, if you’re outside of the top 1,000 closest words, cold. It will also provide a number informing you of the closeness of the word: 100 indicates the word is identical, so you can tell if you’re moving in the right direction. Theoretically this can go as low as -100, game creator David Turner writes, “but in practice it’s around -34.”

Yes, that’s every bit as hard as it sounds, and you’ll certainly need more than the six guesses Wordle gives you. The game’s dictionary is based on the 5,000 most popular English language words (with hyphenated and capitalized ones removed) and not all of them are nouns.