About Lettra

What it is

Lettra is a free daily word game. Every day there is one category and a board of all 26 letters, and the puzzle is to name a word fitting that category for as many letters as you can before the clock runs out.

Everyone gets the same puzzle on the same day, and finishing gives you a grid of coloured squares you can share without giving away a single answer.

It takes two or three minutes. That is the whole idea — it is meant to be a small fixed thing in a day, not something that asks for an evening.

Where it came from

The game owes its shape to Tapple, a party game played with a plastic wheel of letters and a timer that everyone races. That game needs the hardware and it needs a table of people. Lettra is an attempt to keep what makes it good — the scramble, the pressure, the letter you cannot get — in something one person can play on a phone in a queue.

The clock is the piece that changed most. A fixed countdown punishes a slow start and then stops mattering. Lettra’s timer is elastic instead: it drains constantly and every correct answer pushes it back up, so the round lasts exactly as long as you keep finding words. It ends when you run dry, which feels considerably more like the original.

How the puzzles are made

Every category has an answer list that is built and checked by hand before the puzzle is ever published, and that list is the limit of what the day accepts.

Lettra also carries a 172,000-word English dictionary, which is what lets it tell you the difference between “that is not a word” and “that is a real word, just not on today’s list”. The trade-off is honest and worth stating: a word you think is fair will occasionally be turned down, because a person decided the list rather than an algorithm guessing at one.

The rules page covers scoring, rare letters, and what makes an answer valid.

Your data stays in your browser

There are no accounts and no sign-up. Your streak, your stats, and every word you have ever typed live in your own browser’s local storage and are never sent anywhere. Clear your browser data and it is genuinely gone — we keep no copy, because we never had one. (The iOS app can optionally connect to Apple Game Center for leaderboards; that is the one exception, and it is always your choice.)

The web version keeps analytics to anonymous, cookieless page-view counts — never how you play. The privacy policy sets out the full detail, including the advertising shown in the margins on desktop.

Where to play

Lettra runs in any modern browser at lettra.app — nothing to install, and it works offline once the day’s puzzle has loaded. An iOS app is in development.

Feedback

Spotted a bug, disagree with a rejected word, or have a category idea? Tell us at feedback@lettra.app — every message is read.