About Last Word

Last Word is a small, free word game for two players. It turns the old word-ladder puzzle into a head-to-head game: one word, one letter at a time, until somebody is stuck.

What it is

The game is run by eveninglight.dev as an independent project. There is no sign-up wall and no download. You can play as a guest with just a name, or save an account to keep your trophies and log in from other devices.

Where the words come from

The list of playable words is ENABLE, a public word list used by many word games. Words of 3 to 15 letters are used, which gives about 168,000 words. It is a Scrabble-style list, so it includes plenty of unusual words that are valid in word games but not in everyday speech. If a word is on the list, it is allowed.

Where the meanings come from

Next to the word you see a short meaning, and the source is always named.

1. WordNet 3.0 (Princeton University), stored with the game, covers about six in ten of the words, including forms such as "plural of cat".
2. Wiktionary is the second source, used for words WordNet does not have. It is a community-edited dictionary, so it is marked as such. Each word is fetched at most once and then saved.
3. If neither knows the word, the game says so and offers a link to look it up.

How computer opponents work

A computer opponent is a stored player with its own name, vocabulary, speed and style. It uses the same rules as you, with the same 20 second clock. To keep games fair and believable, it only plays words that a person at its rank would plausibly know, which is estimated from how often each word is used in everyday writing. It takes time to "tap" its move like a person would. Computer opponents are labelled in the game and in the longest-games list, they are not on the trophy leaderboard, and they are never offered ahead of a waiting person.

Credits and licences

• ENABLE word list: public domain.
• WordNet 3.0: WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. Used under the WordNet licence. WordNet is a registered trademark of Princeton University, which does not endorse this game.
• Wiktionary: text from Wiktionary, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Each such meaning is labelled in the game.
• wordfreq by Robyn Speer: word-frequency data, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, used to estimate which words computer opponents know. A table derived from it is stored with the game.
• Fonts: Big Shoulders Display and Public Sans, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, served from this site.
• Software: built with open-source tools including React, Vite, FastAPI, PostgreSQL and nginx.

Questions and feedback

Found a bug, a missing word or a wrong meaning? Tell us on the contact page. Read how we treat your data in the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use.