Word ladder solver

The rules of a word ladder

Change one letter at a time. Every step has to land on a real word, and the letters stay where they are — no adding, removing or shuffling. COLD to WARM is the famous one, and it takes four steps: COLD, CORD, CARD, WARD, WARM. The puzzle was invented by Lewis Carroll, who called it Doublets and set them as a weekly column in 1879.

What "shortest" means here

The tool treats the dictionary as a map: every word of your length is a place, and two places are connected if they differ by one letter. It then walks outwards from your start word a step at a time, so the first route it reaches the end by is necessarily the shortest one. If it says six steps, there is no five-step ladder. There may well be other six-step ladders — this shows one of them.

When there is no ladder at all

Plenty of pairs have none. Some words have no neighbours whatsoever — change any single letter and you get a non-word — so they sit alone and no ladder can reach them. Others belong to a cluster that simply never connects to the one you're aiming at. The everyday-words setting makes this far more likely, because it throws away the obscure words that often form the bridge. Switch to every word and a surprising number of dead ends open up.

Setting one as a puzzle

Pick two words that are related but opposite — HEAD and TAIL, BLACK and WHITE, WHEAT and BREAD — and check the ladder here first so you know it exists and how long it runs. Give your solvers the two ends and the number of rungs. Four- and five-letter words make the best puzzles: three-letter ladders are over too quickly, and anything above six tends to need words nobody uses.

Related tools

The word finder matches a pattern like C?LD, which is the manual version of what each rung of this search does. For rearranging letters rather than replacing them, try the anagram solver or the multi-word anagram solver.

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