Going the distance

Welcome to the OneLook Wordplay newsletter, Series 2! It’s been a minute, as they say. And by that I mean nearly 6 weeks. I hope your holidays were filled with the finest words, whether you said them, read them, or otherwise shared them with the people you love.

While this newsletter is just celebrating its first birthday, the OneLook website is preparing for a much larger milestone: thirty years of operation this August. For those of you who are new here, OneLook is a reference website featuring an English dictionary search engine, a thesaurus, and a growing collection of wordplay gizmos. We’ve been answering queries — and under perpetual redevelopment — since 1996. This makes OneLook, as I’m fond of noting, a full two years older than a certain youthful upstart called Google.

OneLook’s home page in October, 1996, when the Internet Archive did its first major crawl.  (Source)

I use the newsletter to bridge the gap between OneLook’s history and its future. On an approximately biweekly basis, I’ll do some combination of (1) play-testing new features and games we’re building, (2) reviewing the best (and weirdest) word games I can find elsewhere on the Web, and (3) exploring whatever linguistic rabbit holes I fall into along the way. I’ll occasionally reflect on the state of the Web at large, fueled by the same “dream of the 90s” that got us (and a million other projects) started thirty years ago.

If you want to see the ground the newsletter covered last year, feel free to browse the back issues. Otherwise, settle in; we’re in this for the long haul!

Celebrate with some Cake

It’s not just me. Many Americans are nostalgic for the 1990s lately, even people who weren’t alive then. If this describes you, then I’m pleased to say that I’ll be linking to a 90s pop culture artifact — a 1996 artifact, to be precise, in honor of OneLook’s birth year—in every newsletter issue this year.

These blurbs will usually live in the postscript, but I’ll put this first one up front. Given the theme of longevity and perseverance, I can’t think of a better way to jump-start this gimmick than with the rock song The Distance by Cake, which is a dry, dogged exercise in 1990s alt-rock. Please enjoy the music video, which has some great shots of 1990s-era San Francisco:

The Distance was released the very same month that onelook.com went online — August, 1996. Like OneLook, it’s spare, but with a strong 90s aesthetic. And like OneLook, Cake is still active, improbably, after all these years.

I can’t speak for OneLook’s longevity but I think the song has aged remarkably well. That might be due to its killer bassline or extreme karaoke-friendliness. But there’s something else about it that transcends generations. I’ll never forget visiting my college friend Ed a few years ago; his then-10-year-old son greeted me with a complete and flawless deadpan recitation of the lyrics from memory. I still hear “Reluctantly crouched at the starting line…” in my head every time I go for a run.

Recap: Your special words

I know it seems like a lifetime ago, but I’d like to tie up some loose ends for the 80% of you who were with me in 2025.

In “Issue 21: Famous Last Words”, I doled out 5 different vocabulary words to each subscriber. I hope you were able to use your words wisely. (You’ll need to find the email if you want to review your words; the Web link won’t have them. If you’re new to the mailing list since then, hang tight—there will be similar shenanigans in the future.)

I also offered $10 Etsy gift cards to anyone who could find a song that used at least 4 of their words. For example, mine included the words conviction, contradiction, karma, and survival, which I recognized from Culture Club’s 1983 hit Karma Chameleon. (Alas, as the provider of the gift cards, I was ineligible to win.)

Indulge me for a brief behind-the-scenes look at that email. It wasn’t like a Powerball ticket at all; every ticket was a winner. I wrote a bit of software to identify hundreds of song lyrics with unusual vocabulary words, and it selected one such song for each subscriber. In the process, the program picked four words from the lyrics plus one random “distractor” word to be the recipient’s five “Words of the year”.

If all 700 of you had found your songs, I’d have been out a small fortune in gift cards. As it turned out, only 3 people succeeded, which is about what I expected to happen. For one thing, I had counted on most people not reading the section or not being enticed enough by a $10 Etsy gift card to go through the trouble. Also, the words were picked in such a way that most of the songs would not be found with a simple Google search — or even with AI assistance. (Side note to this side note: I find that chatbots are really bad at lyrics-related queries. Perhaps this is due to copyright constraints. But that’s a subject for another time.)

The three lucky winners identify themselves as “K from New York City”, “Tina from Illinois”, and “Daryl from the San Francisco Bay Area”. A small group, yes, but they cover a lot of geography. Their secret songs were all rock: Chain Lightning by Rush; Bringer of Plagues by Divine Heresy; and Melancholy Mechanics by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I didn’t look at the words selected for all of the subscribers before sending the email, so a few of you may have been dealt weirdly dark ones, like one reader who reported getting words that were all specifically related to apocalyptic theology. My apologies for the random and highly unseasonal spookiness.

Recap: Word of the Year

In that same issue I said that the American Dialect Society—the "official" voice of American English—hadn't yet weighed in on their Word of the Year. Unlike the dictionary companies they have the good sense to wait until after the year is over. On January 9 the ADS conclave happened in New Orleans and they eventually settled on the word “slop”, the ubiquitous term for low-quality, AI-generated filler content. The word evokes fears of a monoculture in which every new item is just a bland synthesis of ideas from the past. Somewhat ironically, this is the same word that Merriam-Webster picked a month ago.

Recap: Twisteroo

Readers may remember (“Issue 20: Five real-life delights”) that I used AI to resurrect a broken old puzzle of mine called Twisteroo. In the two months since then I’ve heard from more people who have played the revived Twisteroo than I did in the 10+ years of its first incarnation. So I declare the resurrection a success — or at least, I’m not feeling guilty about whatever electricity I used to power the AI model.

Some of the feedback came from a Substack writer I follow — the relentlessly imaginative T Campbell, who is also a crossword constructor, webcomic author, and the editor of the Journal of Wordplay. His post about Twisteroo is here. Since seeing it I’ve fixed the problem he observed with duplicate puzzles, and I’m inspired to tweak the Twisteroo concept a bit more to make it more consistently fun.

By the way, if you want to see what “going the distance” means for a crossword constructor, check out T’s Ubercross site for the biggest crosswords you’ll ever see. And I can feel confident in that statement because he holds the Guinness World Record for the largest online crossword puzzle with 116,370 clues.

A final note on Twisteroo: In Issue 20 I challenged readers to complete two particularly difficult levels, “SOLUTIONS ARE NOT THE ANSWER” and “ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL”. K from New York City sent valid solutions to this along with their song answer. In case you want to try your hand at these puzzles, I’ve put K’s solutions in the postscript of this issue.

Word games from around the Web

Each newsletter issue concludes with a section like this one in which I highlight non-OneLook word games that you can play in your browser. This week I’d like to focus on a few entertaining and recently released daily word games that have Twisteroo-like letter-grid mechanics. That may sound like a preposterously large set of qualifiers, but AI coding tools have accelerated the rate at which games in all categories are being converted from dreams to prototypes, so there’s plenty to consider!

Gridella: Gridella is an amusing memory game in which you have to tap out a given 9-letter word on a grid. As in Twisteroo, the letters can twist horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. But you don’t get to pick where the letters go. The starting letter is given to you, and only the immediately surrounding letters are shown. For example, consider today’s goal, “SHAREWARE”:

You’ve completed the “S”, and now you have two choices for the “H”. Picking one of them will reveal the tiles surrounding whichever H you choose, and hide the rest. If you run into a dead end, as is quite likely to happen in your early attempts, then you have to start over. If you can remember the map that’s been revealed to you so far, you’re likelier to finish the word on your next try.

I needed 16 attempts to finish SHAREWARE because I have the memory of a gnat. Gridella told me that the average for the day is 7 attempts. Rude! Can you beat that? (At the low end, it would seem to come down to luck, but that’s fine; a little randomness in a word game never hurt anyone.)

Uncrossy: This one’s more challenging and it’s an elegant concept, if a touch more frustrating than Gridella. You’re given a grid like the one below from yesterday’s puzzle:

You remove one word at a time by sliding it to a valid new position. Horizontal words slide horizontally, and any vertical words slide vertically. A “valid” new position is one that (a) doesn’t leave any empty letters in the grid — for example you cannot move “SPOKES” to the left, since that would leave a gap after “SCAR”; and (b) you must form valid new crossing words after you make the move. For example, you can move the “ION” down a notch so that “RODE” becomes “RIDE”. The “ION” is then removed, freeing you to slide “RODE” two notches to the left to make “CAPED”, thereby removing “RODE”. There aren’t many choices for the first few moves, but it starts to get harder in a hurry.

This is all easier to show than it is to tell, so it’s worth doing the interactive tutorial on the site; in fact, the site seems to force you to do that before you play for real.

Unlike Gridella, there’s no element of luck in Uncrossy, strictly speaking. But it might take superhuman visualization skills — and super-gnat memory — to plan the optimal sequence of moves. It’s also possible to get “stuck” in the sense that you can remove a sequence of words that leaves you with no path forward. A helpful backspace button lights up when this happens, and the “Hint” modal is very good at guiding you to a path forward if one is available. I love that it has a “Say more” button.

Lettered. Finally, a more relaxing game that will demand the least time of the three. You just slide Tetris-like globs of letter tiles onto a grid to reveal a secret message.

I’ve made the first two moves in yesterday’s puzzle, above, by sliding the 6-tile burgundy piece into the only place where it fits, followed by the brown piece into its only valid spot. I won’t spoil the secret message in case you want to play it in their archives.

The shape-packing aspect of Lettered reminds me of a little shareware DOS game I wrote many moons ago (in 1992!) called Fiddle. Fiddle involved only shapes, not letters, and rotation was allowed. You can still play Fiddle in an emulator online here if you haven’t had your fill of 1990s nostalgia. As I recall, there’s a janky fireworks display when you finish all 26 levels.