Cemantix

Cemantix hides one secret French word a day and tells you nothing about its letters. Every word you submit comes back with a temperature: a hundred degrees means you found it, deep negative values mean you are nowhere near, and a word that lands among the thousand nearest to the answer also gets a rank from 1 to 1000 per mille. The proximity is contextual rather than orthographic, computed with a word2vec model from a corpus of over a billion words of French text, so two words that keep the same company score close even when they are not synonyms. The game is written by enigmatix, inspired by Semantle by David Turner, and runs on the same site as Pedantix. There is no length, no position and no attempt limit, so the whole game is chaining associations and following the temperature upward until the party face appears.

1. Type any French word in the Mot field and send it. There is no length or letter to respect, but accents count, capitals are ignored and proper nouns are generally refused.
2. Read the temperature that comes back. Negative means far away, and the higher the number, the closer the meanings sit.
3. Watch for a rank in per mille. It appears only when your word is among the thousand nearest to the answer, and it climbs from 1 to 1000.
4. Check the legend in the left panel when an icon throws you: it lists the day's temperatures for the ranks 1000, 999, 990, 900 and 1, down to the ice cube at minus a hundred.
5. Follow the warmest thread. Each try lands in a table under the headings Nº, Mot, °C, ‰ and Progression, which you can re-sort from its headers.
6. Keep going until the temperature reads a hundred, or press Révéler le mot secret to give up and see the answer.

Take away the letters and a word game stops being about spelling. Cemantix asks what a word means and who it keeps company with, which is why a session often ends with you learning that two words you thought unrelated sit next to each other in French usage. It suits patient players who enjoy circling a meaning, and the rules say so outright: expect more than six tries, probably dozens, so a session can run from ten minutes to most of an afternoon in the background. Skip it if you want letter feedback or a quick guaranteed finish. It is free, needs no account, and past words cannot be replayed.

Each accepted word is appended to a table under the headings Nº, Mot, °C, a thermometer, ‰ and Progression. A cold word comes back as a negative temperature with an empty rank column, meaning it sits outside the thousand nearest, and a repeated word is shown again without being counted. Once a word enters that list, its rank in per mille and a progress bar appear next to the temperature. The legend decodes the icons, and at a hundred degrees the page announces your place among the day's finders and your number of tries, with a share button and a checkbox to reveal the nearest words.

Mot du jour

One secret word a day, the same for every player, drawn at random at midnight French time, with no attempt limit.

Collaborer

Team play on the same daily word: create or join a team with a code valid for the day, and every word from the top thousand found by one member is shared with the others.

• Open wide rather than narrow. Abstract words like travail, matière or histoire touch many neighbourhoods at once and tell you which direction is warm, where a precise noun tells you only that it is cold.
• The temperature is a proximity of usage, not of meaning. Two words that appear in the same sentences score close even when they are opposites, so a very warm word may be the answer's contrary.
• The rank matters more than the degrees once you are near. Moving from rank 900 to rank 40 is real progress even when the temperature barely moves.
• Submit singular forms only. The rules say conjugated verbs and feminine or plural variants were removed from the dictionary, so what you are hunting is a singular noun or a masculine singular adjective, and a plural or a past participle is a wasted turn.
• Read the ten-icon line under the day number as your progress bar rather than the try count: it summarises your guesses by heat, and your end-of-game ranking is your place among the players who found the word, independent of how many tries you needed.
• Play it as a team when you are stuck. The Collaborer panel generates a code valid for the day: everyone who enters it receives the top-thousand words you find, and you receive theirs.