Start Here: A Reading Path Through English Words

This page puts The Verbarium’s guides in a sensible order, whether you are here to understand how English words behave or to get faster at a timed round. Each step builds on the one before it, and most take ten or fifteen minutes. Steps 1, 2 and 9 are about our own game and are marked as such; if you are here for the words rather than the round, start at step 3.

The game in one paragraph. You are served one letter and type as many accepted words of three or more letters that start with it as you can. In Adventure mode you race a bot through 20 levels, and the round ends when the bot finishes, which is well before the sixty-second clock on higher levels. In 1v1 Live you play a friend over three full sixty-second rounds on the same letters.

Step 1 (if you play): Try a few rounds first

If you want a feel for where your gaps are, play three or four Adventure rounds and notice which letters left you stuck and whether you ran out of ideas or ran out of time. Those two problems have different fixes, and the rest of this path deals with both. Here for the words rather than the game? Skip to step 3.

Step 2 (if you play): Learn the real deadline

The single most useful fact about Adventure mode is that the bot, not the clock, ends the round. Level 1 needs 5 words before the bot finishes at 55 seconds; level 20 needs 24 words before about 31 seconds. We tested this on the live game at fixed typing speeds, and the results are in Adventure mode, tested. Check what your current level asks of you:

Adventure level calculator

Your level Seconds per word you can manage

Then read how to win timed word games, which splits a round into three phases and shows how to scale them to the bot’s deadline.

Step 3: Get fast on the common letters

A handful of letters carry most of English, and most of any timed round. S, C and P between them come up in about 27% of rounds in our game, while Q, X, Z, J and Y each appear in well under 1%, so the common letters repay attention first. Use the explorer to see how a common letter divides into two-letter openings, and practise sweeping those openings one after another.

Letter explorer

Starting letter

Shows every two-letter opening for the letter, how many accepted words start with it, and the short words behind each one.

A letter-locked practice link, such as /play/?letter=s, serves the same letter every round so you can drill one letter until the first ten words come without searching.

Step 4: Learn the three-letter words for narrow letters

Three-letter words are the ones people forget they know, and they are worth having ready whether you are solving a crossword, playing on paper or racing a clock. The three-letter word self-test covers the nine letters with the fewest of them, checks the words you type, and scores a final round of tricky spellings.

Step 5: Prepare for the hard letters

The narrow letters are where memory fails and where a reference actually helps, in a round or anywhere else. Start with the reference guide to Q, X, Z and J, then the three letters in the next tier, each written in a different format: a visual map of K, timed drills for V and five myths about W.

Step 6: Turn one word into several

One base word usually brings a family with it, and knowing which endings a word takes is as useful in writing as it is in a round. The prefix and suffix worksheet is a 20-second routine for checking plurals, verb forms and derivatives, including the spelling changes that trip people up.

Step 7: Train recall, not recognition

Reading a word list helps you recognise words, but a round asks you to produce them from nothing. Word recall training is a ten-minute routine with a seven-day log for building exactly that skill.

Step 8: Understand why words get rejected

Every rejection has a specific cause: too short, wrong letter, already played, blocked, or simply not in the list. Knowing which one applied saves you from repeating it. The FAQ on words you can’t play explains the common cases, and the checker below tests any spelling against the same rules the game uses. For the method behind every count on this site, see how we check words.

Is this word in our list?

Checks the same fixed word list every count on this site comes from, and the offensive-word blocklist. The list (about 450 KB) loads the first time you check a word.

If you like the odd corners of the word list, the real-or-fake quiz and the page on words with no vowels are good places to test your instincts.

Step 9 (if you play): Play with other people

1v1 Live is the fairest way to compare two players, because both get identical letters over a full minute. For families and classrooms, the game night and classroom guide sets out session plans, scoring variants and a printable score sheet.

Printables

Each of these is a single A4 page, generated from the same word list the game uses and dated so you know which version it reflects.

Adventure level table: targets, bot deadlines and time per word for all 20 levels.
Three-letter words for X, Q, Z, U, I, V, J, K and Y.
Hard letters cheat sheet for Q, X, Z and J.
Prefix and suffix card.
Seven-day recall log.
Game night score sheet for up to eight players.