Powering New Kinds of Word Games

400K

Words

~40M

Connections

~100

Relations per word

Word Games Have Been Stuck on Spelling for a Hundred Years

A huge audience craves wordplay, but gets spelling tiles. Obscure letter combinations win and meaning is irrelevant. We think that’s upside down.

Of the ~$10 billion/year puzzle market, industry estimates put wordplay at roughly $3B/year. The market is driven by crosswords and spelling games: Scrabble, Wordle, Word Cookies, Wordscapes.

But a new generation of word games is on the horizon. Semantic games that navigate meaning instead of letters. Taboo is a popular party game, and online, the New York Times has a popular categorization puzzler. We created a pathfinding game, In Other Words.

We want to help you tap into this space with rich semantic data from our own decade of game development—tools to create new mechanics centered on word meanings.

More Than a Word List

The market for semantic games is immature because of practical limits that no longer exist. Before touchscreens, semantic games required typing or thousands of playing cards. Before LLMs, they required an unfeasible scale of human labor to brainstorm enough word relationships.

But LLMs alone aren’t enough. Each AI inference is independent—no global consistency, and no balanced coverage of non-obvious meanings. See what they miss →

Our project is unusual because we started pre-LLM. We built a foundation that was creative but noisy. With LLMs, we curated it into great, playable word relationships. We maintain 1.5M words and 100M+ connections internally. We ship 400K words and ~40M connections—curated, production-ready, noise-free.

What You Get

Core associations — ~40 related words per entry, ranked by connection strength
Sense clouds — Associations grouped by facet (weather vs. computing vs. figurative)
Word families — Morphological groups (cloud, clouds, cloudy, cloudless, overcast)
Definitions — Readable paragraphs, not numbered dictionary fragments
Content filters — Blocklists for offensive and suggestive terms
1.46 million usage examples — Real sentences from books and journalism

Delivered as files you can embed (TSV, SQLite, JSON) or query via API. See delivery options →

What This Unlocks

We analyzed the graph: 76% of English word pairs connect in 7 hops or fewer. Average path length is 6.43 steps. Meaning-space is more navigable than people realize. “Sugar” to “peace” feels impossible, but the path exists.

The design space is wide open. Any proven mobile mechanic can work with meaning instead of spelling.

We’ve built one: In Other Words, a daily puzzle where you navigate drifting word clouds to build bridges between concepts. It’s live on iOS.

Get in Touch

Linguabase is developed by IDEA.org and available for licensing. See licensing options →