Hot & Cold Semantic Word Game
No grid, no letters to match. Type any everyday noun and it comes back ranked 🧊 freezing to 🔥 blazing by how close it lands in meaning to the secret word. Like Wordle, but semantic.
Free. No sign-up required. Plays in your browser.
Also on mobile
Rank #1 is the secret. Everything else is a temperature.
Every guess is ranked against the whole list of about 15,000 words. A lower rank runs hotter, so the whole game is chasing that number down.
Warmer than your last guess means keep pulling that thread. Colder means try another idea.
In the clip above:
winter #914 🌧️ cold,
sugar #36 💦 warm,
bean #20 🌶️ hot.
Then the secret itself, and the round is scored.
Endless
Another word, right now
No waiting for tomorrow. Set the timer, the hints and the letter count before the round starts, then keep pulling words until it clicks.
Start a round →
Multiplayer
One link, one secret, everyone
Share a room link and everyone plays the same word each round. Join one already running, or miss it entirely and catch the next. Go head to head, or split into 2 to 4 teams that share one board. Chat is built in.
Open a room →
Two more modes, in the app
Both score every guess on your device, so a round works with no connection at all.
Challenge a bot Mobile only
A room that runs entirely on your device. No connection, and nobody to wait for.
Heat Ascension Mobile only Beta
A roguelike climb: 9 floors of rarer and rarer secrets against one HP bank, with cards you draft between them.
Learn the game
- How to play Hot & Cold. The full guide to heat, ranks, hints and scoring, with a worked example round.
- Strategy & tips. How to open wide, read the heat gradient, and tell when a hint is worth its cost.
- What is a semantic word game? Like Wordle, but for meaning: how word embeddings power the heat meter.
- Hot and Cold game rules. How the classic hiding game works, and where our word game got its name.
- Games like Wordle. Eight daily word puzzles compared, grouped by the kind of thinking each one asks for.
- FAQ. Quick answers about the daily word, scoring, accounts and offline play.
Today's puzzle is waiting.
Play Hot & Cold →