How to play Betweenle

The rules

The dictionary is the board, and the board is three rows: the hidden word in the middle, and above and below it the two words it sits between. You start between the very ends of the dictionary and you type into the middle row. Each guess slides into whichever end it beats, so the gap closes and spent guesses leave the screen. You are told nothing about letters. Everything the game says hangs off the rail beside the rows: a badge on each bound carries the share of the whole word list lying between that bound and the answer, and the dot between them marks where inside the gap the word actually sits — not merely which end it is nearer — which is what lets you aim rather than only halve. Letters that would carry you outside the gap grey out as you type, so a guess that could tell you nothing cannot be entered at all. The strip of pips above the board is grouped by what each guess costs: the group you are standing in is the score you would keep by solving now, so a tight solve is worth more than a safe one.

Play today's Betweenle →

What is a Betweenle?

Betweenle is a word puzzle in which you find a hidden five-letter word by alphabetical position rather than by letters, with each guess told only whether the answer comes before or after it in the dictionary, and fourteen guesses to close the gap.

Also known as: alphabetical word search game, dictionary bisection puzzle.

How do you solve a Betweenle?

  1. 01

    Cut the dictionary, not the alphabet

    Words are not spread evenly across the letters: S, C, B and P begin far more five-letter words than X or Q. A first guess around the middle of the dictionary is a word starting with M or L, not with M's neighbour in the alphabet. The distance badges are measured in words, and thinking in words is what makes them useful.

  2. 02

    Read the dot, then aim

    After the first guess a dot appears between the two bounds at the exact fraction of the way from one to the other where the answer lies. If it sits a third of the way from the upper bound, your next guess should be a word roughly a third of the way through the words between them. This turns halving into aiming and is why fourteen guesses is plenty.

  3. 03

    Let the keyboard guide the prefix

    Letters that would take you outside the gap grey out as you type, so once the bounds share a first letter you can only type that letter, and the next letter is limited to the range between the bounds' second letters. Follow the live range: it is telling you which prefix the answer must have.

  4. 04

    Finish on a familiar word

    The answer is always a recognisable word, so in the last stretch list the common words with the forced prefix and pick the one in the middle of them. A tight finish keeps more pips: the first few guesses are free, and every group after that costs a star.

Common Betweenle mistakes

  • Guessing by letter, as in a coloured-tile game. Nothing here reports letters; a guess is only a position, and the useful thing about it is where it cuts the list.
  • Halving blindly when the dot has told you where to aim. Bisection alone takes about twelve cuts through a few thousand words; interpolation takes far fewer.
  • Trying a word outside the bounds. It cannot narrow anything, so the board greys the letters out and the guess is refused, which is time lost rather than a row.

Where does Betweenle come from?

Betweenle appeared in 2022 among the games that borrowed the daily-word habit of Josh Wardle's Wordle and replaced its mechanic. Where the coloured-tile games tell you about letters, Betweenle tells you about order: the answer is somewhere in the alphabetical list of words, and every guess is a cut that leaves it on one side.

This site's Betweenle is its own implementation of that puzzle type. The board is three rows, the answer trapped between the two nearest guesses, and each bound carries the share of the word list lying between it and the answer, with a dot marking where in the gap the word sits. The pool is recognisable words rather than the whole dictionary, which is what makes a fixed budget fair, and a strip of pips scores a solve by how few guesses it took.

How many guesses do you get in Betweenle?

Fourteen. The strip of pips above the board groups them by cost, so solving inside the first group keeps all five stars and each later group keeps one fewer.

Is Betweenle free, and when does the word change?

Betweenle is free and needs no sign-up. A new word is set every day at midnight UTC. There is no timed mode for this variation at present, because the run board cannot show its rail and letter range. It plays on a phone as well as a desktop.