About Feetle: An Independent Word Ladder Game

An independent, fan-made game

feetle.games is a free daily word ladder made by fans of the genre. It has no accounts and shows no ads.

It isn't affiliated with any other website. We don't use their puzzles, word lists, code or artwork. The rules of a word ladder belong to nobody; Lewis Carroll was setting them as Doublets in 1879.

The Feetle home page on a phone: puzzle #8, DUMB to FEET at par 7, with an empty first row, Undo, Hint and Give up, and the on-screen keyboard. — No sign-up and no ads: the puzzle is the first thing on the page.

Where the words come from

Two public-domain word lists, both widely used by word game makers:

ENABLE gives the words you may step on: 3,852 four-letter words after our cuts. It's generous, so FETA, FETE, FERN and LEET all count.
12dicts (the 2of12inf list by Alan Beale) marks which of those are everyday words: 2,507 of them. Start words come only from this list, and the answer pages prefer it when choosing which shortest ladder to show.

We removed slurs, sexual terms and crude words, because kids play word games too. A few ladders are a step longer for it, and we think that's a fair trade. If you find a word that shouldn't be there, or one that should, tell us.

The Feetle solver on a desktop with MOON entered: MOON is 5 steps from FEET, Hint 1 reading Change letter 3 first and Hint 2 showing MO_N. — The solver's hints come from the same word list the game accepts.

How the daily puzzles are chosen

Puzzle #1 goes live on Oct 18, 2026, and a new one follows every day at 08:00 UTC. Each start word is an everyday word whose shortest ladder to FEET is between 4 and 7 steps. The par follows the day of the week: 4 on Monday and Tuesday, 5 on Wednesday and Thursday, 6 on Friday and Saturday, 7 on Sunday. No start word repeats within a year.

The schedule is generated in advance and kept on the server, never in the page, so nobody can peek at tomorrow's word. Each puzzle's answer page goes up with its hints within half an hour of the switch. The next day at 08:00 UTC, once the puzzle is over, the page gets the full answer and the puzzle joins the archive.

Feetle in a desktop browser: puzzle #8 for Oct 25, DUMB to FEET at par 7 with DUMP and HUMP entered, and the countdown to the next puzzle. — Each puzzle shows its number, date and par, with a countdown to the next one.

Contact

Bugs, word list complaints and ideas: hello@feetle.games.

Feetle in dark mode on a phone: DUMB, DUMP, HUMP and HEMP on a dark green background. — Feetle follows your phone's dark mode. Spot something off in either theme? Write to us.