Target
A new nine-letter puzzle every day
Nine letters, one of them in the middle. Find as many words of four letters or more as you can — every word has to use the middle letter. Tap the tiles or just type, and every word you find comes with its dictionary meaning.
Tap the letters, or tap the line to type
The rules
- Four letters or more. Three-letter words don't count.
- Every word uses the middle letter. That's the one filled in solid — it's what stops the puzzle being an ordinary word search of nine letters.
- Each letter once per word — but if a letter appears twice among the nine, you may use it twice. The tiles do the bookkeeping: each one dims as you use it.
- No proper nouns. No names of people or places, and nothing that needs a capital letter.
- There's always a nine-letter word using every letter on the board. Finding it is the puzzle's namesake, and worth more than any single word — though the ranks below don't require it.
How the ranks work
Good, very good and excellent aren't fixed word counts. They're a share of the words this particular puzzle holds — roughly a third, a half and two thirds — so reaching "very good" is the same amount of work whichever day you play. That is deliberate: the usual complaint about online versions of this puzzle is that the bar means nothing, because one day there are ten words to find and the next there are three hundred.
What you won't see is how many words there are altogether, which is how the newspaper always had it: three numbers to aim at and no total. Knowing the total turns a hunt into a progress bar with a known end, so it stays out of the way until you finish the day.
Your score is kept in this browser, so you can come back to the day's puzzle and pick it up where you left off. Nothing is sent anywhere, and there's no account.
Where the words come from
Every puzzle is screened before it's published, which is the difference between this and nine letters picked at random:
- Common words only. The word list is an ordinary English dictionary narrowed to the words a crossword setter would use — no archaic long tail, so you're never beaten by a word nobody has met.
- Every word has a definition. If the dictionary can't say what a word means, the puzzle doesn't accept it. Find something you didn't know and it tells you what you've found.
- A sensible number of words. Puzzles with a handful of answers, or hundreds, are thrown away rather than published.
- Commonwealth spellings count. COLOUR, REALISE, DEFENCE and TRAVELLED are words here, as they should be.
Definitions come from English Wiktionary and are used under CC BY-SA 4.0, like the answer meanings in the daily crossword. Wiktionary gives its first sense for a word, which is not always the sense you had in mind.
An old puzzle
This one has been a newspaper fixture for decades — in New Zealand and Australian papers as Target, and elsewhere under other names. Wikipedia describes the shape this page shows by default, nine letters with one in the hub, as the word wheel, and the wider family it belongs to — including The Advertiser's Target — as the word polygon.
In print the letters sat in a 3×3 box rather than a ring, so both are here: Box arranges them the way the paper did, Circle puts them back in a ring. The ring isn't a modernisation — it's what solvers have always scribbled in the margin, because a circle has no beginning and no end for your eye to get stuck on. Whichever you last used is the one you'll get tomorrow.
How to find more words
- Work the endings. Once you have a word, try it with -S, -ED, -ER and -ING — the letters are often still on the board.
- Re-roll the letters. Press Circle or Box again and the same letters land in fresh positions, so your eye stops reading them in the order it has already given up on — the same trick as the anagram helper.
- Start from the middle letter. Every word contains it, so try it as the first letter, then the second, then the last.
- Hunt the nine-letter word last. The short words usually reveal which letter pairs the long one is built from.