Language · Pro

Orthographic Neighbours

Climb a ladder of words, one letter at a time

Free to start. Plays in your browser, no download.

The in-app how-to demo for the Orthographic Neighbours

What is the Orthographic Neighbours?

A word ladder is a chain of words of the same length in which each word differs from the next by exactly one letter, such as cold, cord, card, ward. Lewis Carroll popularised the puzzle as "Doublets" in 1879, and psychologists call words that are one letter apart orthographic neighbours: how many neighbours a word has affects how quickly it is recognised.

Orthographic Neighbours turns the word ladder into a clue puzzle. Each rung has a short clue, so you have to retrieve the right word from memory, and the ladder itself helps, because every answer shares all but one letter with the rungs around it. The Neuroptimize version plays two or three ladders per session, with longer words, longer ladders and rarer vocabulary as your level rises.

How to play the Orthographic Neighbours

A ladder of empty rungs appears. The top and bottom rungs are locked; the middle rungs are open, and the selected one is highlighted.
Tap a rung to select it and read its clue below the ladder, then type the word on the on-screen keyboard or your own keyboard. In Chinese you fill the rung by tapping characters from the tiles under the clue.
When the rung is full, the game checks it. A right word turns green. A real word that is wrong breaks your combo and costs a few points, while a string that is not a word just shakes, at no cost, so you can fix a typo.
Every word differs from the rung above and below it by exactly one letter in the same place. At low levels a gold dot between the rungs marks the letter that changes.
From level 8 the middle rungs start in a shuffled order. Solve them, then drag them by the grip (or use Shift with the up and down arrow keys) until each word is one letter from the next. Getting the order right scores points too.
Once the middle is solved and in order, the top and bottom rungs unlock with their own clues. Solve them to climb the ladder.
Stuck? 💡 Letter reveals the next letter of the rung for a small cost and ends your combo. Reveal shows the whole word, but that rung scores nothing.

Strategies and tips

Start with the clue you know

Any middle rung can be solved first. Begin with the clue that comes to you straight away: each solved word gives you all but one letter of the words next to it.

Use the neighbours

If the rung above is COLD, the word you need is COLD with one letter changed. Try the clue against each position in turn: _OLD, C_LD, CO_D and COL_.

Watch where the change moves

Two steps in a row never change the same letter, so if one step changed the third letter, the next one changes a different letter. In ordered ladders at low levels, the gold dots show exactly where.

Order by pairs

When the rungs are shuffled, find two words that share all but one letter and put them together, then look for the word that joins on to either end. Only one order works, apart from turning the whole ladder upside down.

Spend letters on long words

A revealed letter costs points and ends your combo. It pays off on a six-letter rung you cannot see at all, less so on a short word that may come to you with one more look.

The science behind the Orthographic Neighbours

Words that differ by a single letter, like COLD and CORD, are "orthographic neighbours". Max Coltheart and colleagues (1977) counted a word’s neighbours and found that letter strings with many of them take longer to reject as non-words, and Sally Andrews (1989) found that rarer words with many neighbours are recognised faster. Recalling a word from a short clue is the task Roger Brown and David McNeill (1966) used to study the tip-of-the-tongue state, when people can often name a word’s first letter before the word itself. Lewis Carroll published word ladders as "Doublets" in 1879.

Frequently asked questions

What is a word ladder?

A word ladder is a chain of words of equal length where each step changes exactly one letter, for example cold, cord, card, ward. Lewis Carroll called them Doublets.

Why was my answer rejected?

Each rung has one intended word. If you type a different real word, it counts as a wrong answer. If you type something that is not in the word list, the rung simply shakes so you can fix it, and nothing is lost.

How does the Chinese version work?

Chinese ladders use two-character words. Each word keeps one character of the word before it, in the same place, and swaps the other, for example 火车, 火山, 高山. You fill each rung by tapping characters from a small set of tiles.

Is Orthographic Neighbours free to play?

Orthographic Neighbours is a Pro game in Neuroptimize, and Pro starts with a 7-day free trial. Free players can also get it as the Pro game of the day in their daily workout.

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