Glotto

Every day, one word appears in one of 77 languages, along with what it means in English. You have six guesses to work out which language it came from.

sauna

means bath house — and gives the game away, which is why words English has borrowed don't appear.

How a round works

Start typing a language name and pick it from the list. If you're wrong, two things happen: you're told whether you were close, and a new hint appears.

🟩 Right language.
🟨 Wrong, but the same language family or the same part of the world. Guessing Portuguese for Spanish gets you this.
⬛ Not close.

The hints arrive in a fixed order, each one narrower than the last:

Where it's spoken
Roughly how many people speak it
Which family it belongs to
How many countries it's official in
The country with the most speakers

By the last hint you should be able to get there. The point isn't to be impossible, it's to make you think about which part of the world a word feels like it's from.

A new puzzle at midnight

The puzzle changes at midnight UK time, and everyone gets the same one on the same day. Missed a few? Past puzzles are available from the "Past" button.

Where the words come from

Five hundred everyday words — things like water, bread, thunder, mother — translated into 77 languages, then filtered to remove anything that looks too much like the English. A word that gives itself away isn't much of a puzzle.

Facts about each language come from Wikipedia, which draws its speaker numbers from Ethnologue. Speaker counts are shown as ranges because nobody agrees on exact figures, and because they change.

Some languages are left out on purpose. Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian are close enough in writing that telling them apart would be luck rather than skill, so only one of each such group is in the game.

Spotted a mistake?

Translations were checked by machine and by hand, and some will still be wrong, odd or old-fashioned — particularly in the languages with fewer speakers. If you're a native speaker and something looks off, tell me and I'll fix it: help@glottogame.com.

Your stats

Streaks and results are kept in your browser, on this device only. Nothing is sent anywhere, there's no account, and clearing your browser data clears your record too. Play on your phone and your laptop and you'll have two separate streaks.