WORDgps

You're given a fixed start word and a fixed target word of the same length. Each move, swap out exactly one letter for a different one — then arrange all the letters however you like, as long as they spell a real word.

Letter position doesn't matter. FAIL → MAIL only changed the F to an M; MAIL → MAID swapped the L for a D; the letters don't have to stay in their original spots at all.

Every word you enter (the "stops") must be a real, dictionary-valid English word — no proper nouns, no made-up words. A stop can't reuse a letter combination that already appeared earlier in the same route, even spelled differently.

There's often more than one valid route. You don't have to find the exact path we generated — any legal chain of real words that gets from start to target with the required number of one-letter swaps counts as solved.

Example: FAIL → MAIL → MAID → DIMS → MODS is one valid EASY route (F→M, L→D, A→S, I→O — four swaps).

Stuck? HINT reveals the next stop on our sample route. GIVE UP reveals a full solution.

Words are checked first against an offline English dictionary built into the page (the same Hunspell en-US dictionary engine used by Firefox and LibreOffice's spellcheck) — that check is instant and works with no internet connection.

If a word you type isn't in that offline list, and the page has a normal internet connection (e.g. when hosted on Netlify), it's double-checked against a free online dictionary before being rejected. That closes most gaps from the offline list alone. Puzzle generation itself never uses the internet — it needs thousands of instant word lookups per puzzle, far more than any API could serve in real time, so that stays fully local.

Every word, whichever source confirms it, is also checked against a content filter that blocks profanity, slurs, and explicit terms — so an online dictionary source can never reintroduce something the offline list was built to exclude.