Contexto

There is a secret word. Guess any word and it comes back with a number: its place in a list of twenty thousand words sorted by how close each one is to the secret. Rank 1 is the word itself. Something in the low hundreds is a near miss. Fifteen thousand means you are not even in the right subject.

Closeness here is not spelling and it is not meaning in the dictionary sense. Every word has a position worked out from the company it keeps across a very large pile of text, and two words sit near each other when they tend to turn up in the same sort of sentence. So doctor lands near nurse, and king near throne, without either pair sharing a letter that matters.

The word list was built from GloVe, trained on Wikipedia and a few billion words of news, which is worth knowing when you are stuck: it has read an enormous amount about politics and rather less about kitchens. The secret is always an ordinary, concrete noun. The list you are guessing against is anything but.

All of it runs in your browser. The vectors are about a megabyte, fetched once on your first visit, and every guess after that is arithmetic on your own machine — no server sees a word you type.