Word Ladder Game: Play Word Ladder Free Online

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LIMO → LIME → LITE → BITE. Three steps, one letter at a time, and every step a real word — that is a word ladder, the purest word game ever made. Word Ladder on GameOLL gives you 40 set ladders in four tiers plus a Daily Ladder that is the same for every player, and every ladder shows its par: the fewest steps the climb can possibly take, found by exhaustive computer search before the ladder ships. Match par with no hints and you earn 3 stars. It is free, it runs in your browser on phone or PC, and there is nothing to download or sign up for.

🎮 Genre: Word Puzzle · 👤 1 Player · 📱 Browser (no download) · 💰 Free

In this guide

• How to play Word Ladder
• Controls — tap, type, undo
• The 40 set ladders: four tiers
• The Daily Ladder and your streak
• Stars, hints and undo
• Six tips to climb faster
• The word list, honestly
• Word Ladder FAQ
• Final verdict

How to play Word Ladder

A word ladder gives you two words of the same length: a start word at the bottom and a target word at the top. Your job is to climb from one to the other by changing exactly one letter at a time. Every word you step on must be a real English word. That is the whole rule — and it is enough to build a deep puzzle, because the shortest route is rarely the obvious one.

Here is the first ladder on this page, solved. The start word is LIMO and the target is BITE, and par is 3:

1. LIMO → LIME. Change the last letter, O to E. A limo becomes a lime — silly, but legal, and legality is all that matters.
2. LIME → LITE. Change the third letter, M to T. Now you are one step from home.
3. LITE → BITE. Change the first letter, L to B. Target reached in 3 steps, exactly par.

To play, tap any letter tile in your current word so it lights up, then tap a new letter on the keyboard under the board. If the word you make is in the game list, it is added as your next step and the changed letter glows so you can follow the climb. If it is not a real word, the game refuses it and tells you why — there is no penalty, just try another letter. You can never change two letters at once: the board only ever arms one tile, so the one-letter rule is built into the controls themselves.

The game was invented by Lewis Carroll — the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — in 1877, and published in Vanity Fair two years later under the name Doublets. Carroll made ladders for his young friends and set them as challenges with the fewest links winning. Our version keeps his rules exactly and adds the machinery a modern puzzle needs: a checked word list, a proven par for every ladder, hints that always point along a shortest route, and a daily puzzle to keep the habit alive.

Controls — tap, type, undo

Everything is tap-first for phones, with full keyboard support on PC. The full control list:

Action	How
Choose a letter tile	Tap any tile in the current (bottom) word. Tap it again to unselect it.
Change the letter	Tap a letter on the on-screen keyboard. On PC, just press the letter key.
Move the armed tile (PC)	Left and right arrow keys move the armed tile; Escape unselects it.
Undo a step	Tap Undo, press the ⌫ key on the on-screen keyboard, or press Backspace on PC. Undo is free and unlimited.
Get a hint	Tap the Hint button. You have 3 hints per ladder; a hint places the next word of a shortest climb for you.
Restart the ladder	Tap Restart to clear your steps, hints and timer and start the same ladder fresh.
Open the ladder list	Tap the 📚 Ladders button at the top of the game.
Play the Daily	Tap the 📅 Daily button at the top of the game, or Play Daily on the menu.
Sound on or off	Tap the speaker button at the top of the game. Your choice is remembered.

The 40 set ladders: four tiers

The set ladders are the training ground and the trophy cabinet in one. They are grouped into four tiers of ten, and every ladder's par was computed by breadth-first search over the whole word graph — the computer checked every possible route, so the par printed on the ladder is a promise, not a guess.

Tier	Words	Ladders	Par range	What to expect
Starter	4 letters	1–10	3–5 steps	Short climbs through everyday words. Ladder 1 runs LIMO to BITE in 3; by Ladder 10 you are turning VERY into REED in 5.
Classic	5 letters	11–20	4–6 steps	The Carroll format. HAPPY to PUTTY in 6, DINER to NAVAL in 6 — one extra letter opens far more dead ends.
Mixed	4 and 5 letters	21–30	4–6 steps	The two lengths alternate, so tricks you learned in one tier stop working in the next. POPE to SEEM in 6 is the tier's quiet monster.
Expert	6 letters	31–40	5–7 steps	Long words, long climbs. CUTLER to CORNER takes the full 7; the finale turns STRIPE into SHRUNK in 5.

Nothing is locked: you can open any ladder in any order, and stars are saved per ladder, so the level grid slowly fills with your best results. A useful way to play is to clear a tier at 1 star first, then come back and hunt the missing stars — the second pass feels like a different game, because now you are not looking for any route, you are looking for the route.

The Daily Ladder and your streak

Every day there is one Daily Ladder, picked from a pool of 60 vetted ladders by the date on your own device — so it is the same ladder for every player on the same day, wherever they are. Dailies mix all three word lengths and pars from 3 to 6, which makes them a fair daily test: some days are a warm-up, some days are a fight.

Solve the Daily and your streak grows by one. Miss a day and the streak resets to 1 on your next solve — there are no freezes or second chances, which is exactly what makes a long streak worth having. You can replay a solved Daily as often as you like for a better time or a cleaner line; the streak only counts the first solve of the day. Yesterday's ladder is gone at midnight, so the habit the game asks for is small and daily: one ladder, a couple of minutes, keep the chain alive.

Stars, hints and undo

The star rule is printed in the game and it never changes. Finish in exactly par steps with no hints used and you earn 3 stars. Finish within par + 2 steps using at most 1 hint and you earn 2 stars. Any other finish earns 1 star. There are 120 stars across the 40 set ladders, and the menu keeps your running total.

Hints deserve a special note, because they are stronger here than in most word games. A hint does not just suggest a letter — the game searches from your current word and places the next word of a shortest path to the target, as a real step on your ladder. That means a hint can never waste your time or lead you astray; it can only cost you the third star. Three hints per ladder is generous, and the intended use is learning: burn a hint on a ladder that has you stuck, watch the route it reveals, and next time you will see that route yourself.

Undo is the other half of the design. It is free, unlimited, and instant, because a word ladder should punish nothing: stepping onto a word that turns out to be a dead end is information, not failure. In fact the word list is built so that true dead ends do not exist — every word in the list can still reach every target of the same length — but a route can always get longer than par, and Undo is how you take back the scenic detour. Restart is there too, for the days when you want a clean sheet: it clears steps, hints and the timer on the current ladder.

Six tips to climb faster

1. Work from both ends. Before your first step, ask what words sit one step away from the target. If your start word can reach one of those in par minus 1, you are already on a shortest route. Meeting in the middle is how most 3-star solves begin.
2. Change vowels early. Most stuck ladders are stuck on a vowel. A word like BUST can crawl through BEST and BAST toward whole new families; flipping the vowel opens doors that consonant tweaks never will.
3. Live in word families. Endings like -IGHT, -ACK, -UMP and -EED are highways: dozens of words share them, so steering onto a highway early gives you options at every step. Steering off one onto the target's family is the classic finish.
4. Count the differences. Compare the start and target letter by letter. If three letters differ, par cannot be under 3, and each step must fix at least one difference or set up a word that fixes two later. Steps that fix nothing are usually wasted steps.
5. Undo, do not restart. When a line dies, take one step back, not five. The word you just left was fine; it was the last turn that cost you. Undo keeps the good half of every idea.
6. Spend hints to learn, not to finish. One hint keeps 2 stars alive, and the word it places teaches you the shape of the shortest route. Use the first hint early on a hard ladder and solve the rest yourself — you will earn the star back on the replay.

The word list, honestly

A word ladder game lives or dies by its word list, so here is exactly what is inside this one. The game holds 11,416 words: 3,740 of four letters, 4,806 of five letters and 2,870 of six letters. They were assembled from standard English word lists and frequency data, then cleaned hard: people's names, abbreviations, and rude words were removed, and anything vanishingly rare went with them.

Two guarantees were then checked by computer before a single ladder was designed. First, connection: for each length, the kept words form one connected graph, which means every word can reach every other word of the same length through legal steps — a valid step can never strand you away from the target. Second, honest par: every ladder's start, target and solution path use the most familiar words on the list, and the printed par is the true shortest distance, recomputed from the shipped data. The ladders and the Daily pool were chosen only from climbs that pass both tests.

The trade-off of a cleaned list is that an obscure but real word — some plural you found in a dictionary once — may be refused. That is deliberate. A ladder built on everyday words is a test of thinking, not of who owns the biggest dictionary, and a refusal here always means the same thing: that word is not on the list, so try the next letter.

Word Ladder FAQ

What is a word ladder game?

A word ladder game gives you a start word and a target word of the same length. You change one letter at a time, and every step must be a real word, until you reach the target. The game was invented by Lewis Carroll in 1877. In this version there are 40 set ladders in four tiers, a Daily Ladder, and a par score on every ladder showing the fewest steps the climb can take.

How do you play word ladder?

Tap a letter tile in your current word, then tap the new letter on the keyboard. If the word you make is in the game list it becomes your next step. Keep changing one letter at a time until your word matches the target. Undo is free if a line goes wrong, and each ladder gives you 3 hints that place the next word of a shortest path for you.

What does par mean in Word Ladder?

Par is the fewest steps in which the ladder can possibly be solved. Before a ladder ships, a computer searches every route through the word graph — a method called breadth-first search — and the shortest distance it finds becomes the par printed on the ladder. Finishing in exactly par steps with no hints earns 3 stars.

Why was my word refused?

A word is refused when it is not in the game's word list. The list holds 11,416 common English words of 4, 5 and 6 letters, cleaned of names, abbreviations and rude words. If your word was refused, it is simply not on the list — there is no penalty, so undo nothing and try a different letter.

Is Word Ladder free to play on mobile?

Yes. Word Ladder is completely free and runs in your browser, so it works on phones, tablets and PCs with nothing to download and no account to create. The board is built for touch: tap a tile, tap a letter, and the game fits a portrait phone screen.

Does Word Ladder save my progress?

Yes, in your own browser. Stars and best times save per ladder, your Daily streak and solved days are kept, and a ladder you leave half finished is restored exactly where you left it when you come back. Nothing leaves your device and there is no account to make.

Last updated: November 7, 2026. Word Ladder v1.0 — the first release of our original word-ladder game, with 40 set ladders in four tiers, a Daily Ladder, an 11,416-word cleaned list, search-proven pars, shortest-path hints, free undo and star ratings. An original GameOLL browser game. Found a bug? Tell us in the comments and we will fix it in the next version.