The letter that you drag from the keyboard will be inserted where you see the vertical line, which moves with your mouse.

On some touchscreens, it can be difficult to drag letters from the keyboard to the right spot. Instead, you can tap a letter on the keyboard to activate it, then use your finger to select the insertion point without dragging the letter. Lifting your finger from the screen will activate your guess. You can do something similar with a mouse or touchpad too.

Each time you correctly place a letter, you earn points equal to the number of letters still missing from that word at that moment.

Attempting to place a letter that does not belong in a word or at the wrong place in that word costs 1 point. If the word needs only one more letter to be complete, the penalty is 2 points. Your score will never go below zero.

Incomplete words have a yellow background. Completed words have a blue background.

Hover over any key (or tap it on a touch screen) to see how many times that letter still needs to be placed to complete the puzzle.

Hover over an incomplete (yellow) word — or tap it on a touch screen — to see a clue: every missing letter, alphabetized, including repeats.

Hover over an incomplete (yellow) word — or tap it on a touch screen — to see a clue: the unique missing letters, alphabetized. The clue is suppressed when only one letter remains, or for some short, common, generally abstract words.

Build lets you assemble a sequence of letters and insert them together at the same place. View the Demo to see this in action.

1. Click Build to enter build mode.
2. Tap keyboard keys to add letters to the build box one at a time.
3. When your sequence is ready, drag the build box to a gap in any incomplete word.
4. If every letter in the sequence belongs in that word and fits in order, all are inserted together and you earn the combined award. If any letter fails the check, none are inserted and a single penalty is applied.

The Hint button opens a Scratchpad, where you can select an incomplete word, and shuffle around letters as on a Scrabble rack, though you are protected from rearranging letters already known to be in the correct position. There is a 2 point penalty for using the Hint, but your score never goes below zero.

For logged in users, you can select a quicker hint costing 5 points that reveals half the remaining letters in the word with the most missing letters.

For a solved puzzle, selecting Recap will re-show the shareable "Puzzle Complete" box. For an unsolved puzzle, it will show your last move, whether successful or not, for example, "Last Insertion Attempt: I" with an image showing where you tried to insert the letter I.

You can see your Stats from the Account screen

Logged-in users can access all past puzzles.