7 Little Words

7 Little Words hands you seven clues with their letter counts, and a tray of twenty tiles carrying two or three letters each. Every tile is used exactly once across the seven answers, and you may solve them in any order. One board's clues ran from "filling the suitcase" at 7 letters and "putting on different clothes" at 8, through "\"Spider-Man\" star Tom" at 7 and "Italian sheep's milk cheese" at 8, against a tray holding fragments like PECO, RINO, CHAN and GING. Five separate puzzles are offered for the day, selectable from a row of numbered tabs.

1. Pick one of the five daily puzzles from the numbered tabs.
2. Read the clues with their letter counts. The count tells you how many tiles each answer needs.
3. Tap tiles to build a word in the input bar; they can be taken in any order and returned if wrong.
4. Solve whichever clue you see first. Each correct answer removes its tiles, narrowing the tray for the rest.

The tile constraint is what separates it from a crossword. Every fragment belongs to exactly one answer, so a clue you cannot solve becomes solvable once its neighbours have taken their tiles, the puzzle unlocks itself from the edges inward. That makes it forgiving in a way clue-only games are not: you can be stuck on all seven clues and still make progress by noticing that PECO and RINO can only end up in one place. Five boards a day is generous, and the game has run long enough to have its own vocabulary of tile shapes.

Tiles combine in an input bar and the answer either resolves or it does not; a correct word locks its clue and removes its tiles from the tray, which visibly shrinks the field for everything left. Two controls sit beside the bar: a shuffle that reorders the tray when the layout stops helping, and a hint. The letter count printed beside each clue is the constraint that makes the tray readable, a 9-letter answer needs three tiles or four, and that arithmetic rules combinations in and out before any wordplay begins.

7 Little Words

The flagship board: seven clues, twenty tiles, five fresh puzzles each day.

4 Little Words

A shorter variant with four clues, for a quicker sitting.

Tiny Little Crosswords

A compact crossword from the same publisher, listed beside the daily word puzzles.

For the Classroom

A schools-oriented section of puzzles, offered as an explorable set rather than a daily.

• Do the arithmetic before the wordplay. A 9-letter answer built from two- and three-letter tiles has only a few possible tile counts, and that alone eliminates most of the tray.
• Solve the clue you are surest of first, even if it is the easiest. Removing its tiles is worth more than the point itself.
• Use shuffle when you stall. The tray's layout creates false adjacencies, and reordering it breaks the pattern your eye has settled into.