QuelMot

QuelMot is a French semantic word game, made in France and playable free in the browser or as an Android app. One secret word is hidden each day, and every guess is graded on meaning rather than on letters: type any French word and it comes back with a proximity score between -999 and 1000, where 1000 is the answer. There is no length to match, no letter to place and no cap on attempts. The word is drawn from a dictionary of more than 90,000 common French words, it changes at noon Paris time, and everyone plays the same one. Scores come from a vector model trained on more than a billion French words gathered from the internet. What separates QuelMot from Cemantix, the semantic game most French players already know, is everything built around the puzzle: a training mode, a blind mode, daily and weekly leaderboards, a free daily hint page and an archive of past words.

1. Open the daily board and type any French word into the guess field. There is no wrong answer and no letter to match.
2. Read the proximity score, from -999 for a word with no relation up to 1000 for the answer, and watch the temperature bar change colour.
3. Start broad with words like objet, animal, lieu or sentiment to find the lexical field the answer sits in.
4. Chase the highest scores: once a word passes 300 you have a lead, so work its synonyms, its parts, its context and its category.
5. Change field completely after about ten guesses with no progress, rather than digging deeper in the same direction.
6. Come back after noon Paris time for the next word, or switch to training mode to play again straight away.

For French speakers who already finish Cemantix most days and want the same puzzle with more around it: training words on demand, a blind variant, leaderboards, and a hint page for the days you stall. It suits anyone who likes a hunt with no clock and no wrong answers. Skip it if you do not read French, or if forty to fifty guesses sounds like work rather than pleasure, because that is the average the site itself quotes. A win usually runs ten to twenty minutes; a bad day runs a good deal longer.

Every guess returns a single number, a proximity score between -999 and 1000, alongside a temperature bar that runs blue for cold, yellow for warm, red for burning and gold for solved. The worked example the site publishes, with soleil as the answer, reads pizza at 42 for no relation, mer at 189 for a very vague link, chaleur at 467 for the same context, lumière at 782 for a direct link, ciel at 923 for very close, and soleil at 1000 for found. A miss costs nothing beyond a line on the list and a tick on the attempt counter.

Mot du jour

One secret word a day, released at noon Paris time and shared by every player, with daily and weekly leaderboards ranking the day's results.

Mode entraînement

Practice on demand, with 30 words per difficulty level from easy to expert, so you never have to wait for tomorrow.

Mode aveugle

The same hunt with the score hidden, leaving only the temperature to steer by.

• Semantic proximity is not synonymy. Opposites score high because they share the same contexts: if the answer is chaud, then froid sits very close. A high score tells you the topic, not the direction.
• Plurals, conjugations and gendered forms each carry their own score, so vague and vagues, beau and belle come back as different numbers. Testing both forms of a promising word is worth a guess.
• The answer is always a base form: singular, masculine, infinitive. Only the plural of the secret word also wins, so a conjugated verb will never close the game however high it scores.
• Proper nouns, brands, acronyms, SMS slang and foreign words are refused by the dictionary, so a rejected word is not a cold word, it is simply absent from the 90,000 word list.
• The word changes at noon rather than at midnight, so a morning routine built around other daily games will land on yesterday's word here.
• When you stall, the daily hint page gives three words close to the answer with their scores, free and without revealing it, which reopens a search that has gone in circles.