Word Puzzle Vocabulary: A Plain-English Glossary
The terms you will meet in puzzle instructions and strategy guides, defined briefly, with an example for each.
Last updated October 6, 2026
General puzzle terms
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Anagram | A word made by rearranging all the letters of another. | LISTEN → SILENT |
| Clue | The text that points to an answer. See understanding clues. | “Intense anger” → RAGE |
| Fill-in-the-blank | A clue that quotes a phrase with a word missing. | “Neither here ___ there” → NOR |
| Homophone | Words that sound alike but are spelled differently. | KNIGHT / NIGHT |
| Homograph | Words spelled alike with different meanings. | RECORD (noun) / RECORD (verb) |
| Isogram | A word in which no letter repeats. | PLANET |
| Palindrome | A word that reads the same in both directions. | KAYAK, RADAR |
| Pangram | A sentence using every letter of the alphabet. | “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” |
| Word ladder | A chain in which each word differs from the last by one letter. | COLD → CORD → CARD → WARD → WARM |
| Spoiler | Anything that reveals an answer to someone who has not played yet. | Posting today’s solution |
Letter and spelling terms
| Term | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Blend | Two or three consonants in a row, each still sounded. | ST in START |
| Digraph | Two letters that make one sound. | SH in SHARE |
| Vowel team | Two vowels that work together. | EA in FEAST |
| Prefix | Letters added to the front of a word to change its meaning. | RE- in REPLAY |
| Suffix | Letters added to the end. | -ING in HEATING |
| Root | The core part of a word that carries its basic meaning. | AQUA in AQUEDUCT |
| Letter frequency | How often each letter appears in a body of text or a word list. See the guide. | E is the most common letter in English |
Terms used on MyWordIQ
| Term | Game | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | All | The one puzzle each game publishes per calendar day. It changes at your local midnight. |
| Streak | All | The number of consecutive days on which you completed a game’s daily puzzle. |
| Archive | All | The list of earlier daily puzzles, which you can replay at any time. |
| Locked letter | MyWordIQ | A letter you guessed in the correct position; it stays filled in for later guesses. |
| Chain | SPARES | One complete puzzle: a starting word and the sequence of shorter words that follow from it. |
| Drop | SPARES | To remove one letter from the current word before rearranging the rest. |
| Spare | SPARES | A letter you dropped. Spares are kept in the tray in the order you collected them. |
| Bonus word | SPARES | The word spelled by all of a chain’s spares, in order. |
| Clean step | SPARES | A step solved with no wrong guesses and no hints. |
| Link | ClueLoop | The letter shared by two neighboring answers: the last letter of one and the first letter of the next. |
| Loop Closed | ClueLoop | The finished state, when all five answers are in and the last one links back to the first. |