Here we make word golf on meaning. A hole is two words, an origin and a goal. Each turn shows the current word’s cloud — its fifteen strongest associations — and tapping one moves you there. Reach the goal in as few hops as possible. Our own iOS game, In Other Words, is this game at full scale; this page cuts a course for it from the published tables. The five holes below are all par 3 — each has a three-tap line.
A real semantic-hop game rapidly expands its solution space — the cloud size raised to the maximum hop distance, minus duplicate paths — so a real game needs cloud data stored for every reachable headword. This demo restricts play to exact 3-hop solutions, so for these pre-baked levels this HTML file only embeds the 155–196 clouds each hole can reach. The arithmetic: clouds needed = 1 + 15 + 15² = 241 max per hole — the exponent stops at 2 because the third tap never opens a cloud. Removing duplicates saves 45–86 clouds per hole, roughly 20–35%: associates overlap heavily near any origin — CANDLE’s first-tap words share FLAME-, WAX- and LIGHT-adjacent associates. Across all five holes, 840 distinct clouds versus 1,205 without cross-hole dedup — the ~200 KB this page carries.
This example draws on 4 of the 13 Linguabase tables — one is the course itself, three keep it playable.
| associations | Every word’s related words, ranked strongest first. A cloud is the top of this list after the three filters below — the course is this table. |
| vocabulary | A familiarity rank for every word. The course stops at rank 30,000. |
| scores & labels | The filter: a content rating and a sensitivity score per word. Every cloud holds itself to G and PG. |
| word families | Which words are relatives. It keeps them out of each other’s clouds, so CANDLE never offers CANDLES as a hop. |
All counts on this page are measured against the July 2026 core release — the published parquet files, sorted on core_rank (they arrive unsorted, and the TSV mirrors carry a header row).
Six steps count down from the full ranked vocabulary to every origin–goal pair at par 3 — words first, then clouds, then pairs. Run them one at a time and scrub the survivors on the right; step 7 re-cuts the whole course at other cloud sizes.
41,934,946 pairs sit at par 3 under this cloud rule — 114,890 years of daily holes, and the smallest cloud on the dial still leaves 36,929 years. Example 3 turns five of these pairs into the demo at the top of the page.
The raw association list runs in strength order, and each candidate passes four checks or is cut with a reason — too deep in the ranking, rated past PG, a relative of the headword, or already listed under another spelling. Tap a word and read its list, verdict by verdict:
SPRING’s kept cloud holds JUMP, BOUNCE and LEAP next to BLOSSOM, THAW and PETALS. A hole can enter through the coil and leave through the season.
Cut this way, the course is not evenly connected. SOFT and SWEET each appear in 266 other words’ clouds; PAUSE is in 253. At the other end, 3,270 of the 28,219 words that carry a full cloud appear in no cloud at all — they can be an origin, never a goal. In Other Words met the same shape on its own corpus and went further: words like WISDOM and CLARITY reached so much of the space that it banned them as targets outright.
Each demo hole ships as a small pack: the two ends, every cloud within two taps, and the counted lines. Page through the five:
The demo at the top runs on exactly this pack — the line counts in the record are recomputed live from the same clouds the game deals, so the two cannot drift apart.
This page’s demo is one cloud rule and three taps. In Other Words plays the full form: a daily origin and goal, three to seven hops, unlimited retries, score by hop count. Its launch example connects SUGAR to PEACE:
Under this page’s single cloud rule, SUGAR to PEACE sits beyond three hops — same design, different corpus and curation, different course. What the production game adds on top of the counting here: every daily is built to carry 27–64 three-hop “Genius” lines among roughly 170 million possible paths of up to seven hops, most players land in five or six, pearl-dot hints mark the taps that keep a win alive (the demo above borrows this), and each hole is bookended by literary quotes that use its two words. The construction story — and what a decade of it taught about hub words, dead ends and hint design — is at inotherwords.app/making; the game itself is on the App Store.
The network underneath has been measured from another side too: across a million random word pairs, the average distance is 6.43 hops, and 76% of pairs connect in seven or fewer — which is why a 3–7 hop game has room to exist at all.
At this point the course is counted (Example 1), the cloud rule is visible check by check (2), and five holes are packed and playable (3). What each table contributed:
| Example 1 (counting) | Example 2 (the cloud rule) | Example 3 (the packs) | |
| associations | the clouds, steps 4–6 | the raw ranked list itself | every cloud in the pack |
| vocabulary | the ranked list + the 30,000 cap | the “past the cap” verdicts | the ranks on the record |
| scores & labels | the G/PG filter, step 3 | the “rated out” verdicts | — |
| word families | inside the cloud cut, step 4 | the “relative” verdicts | — |
41,934,946 is one cloud rule against one release. Still open:
For pathfinding games: download the tables from any of the three repositories, state your own cloud rule, and count it the way Example 1 counted this one — then build in your language of choice. The walkthrough demos and each table’s README on the mirrors go deeper — and this page itself is a workable hand-off to whoever builds for you.
To help, two heavily documented draft artifacts for you or your coding agent to continue from: