Word lists. Word associations. Sustainable depth at scale.
Spelling tile games are an established pastime—crosswords and Scrabble for nearly a century, mobile hits like Wordscapes and Words With Friends today. The data requirements are well understood: word lists, difficulty tiers, content filters.
Now, word association games are having their moment. NYT Connections proved the mechanic. Dozens of studios are building variations—grid-based categorization, card-solitaire hybrids, physics puzzles, pathfinding through meaning-space:
They all share the same problem: sustainable depth at scale.
Handcrafting works for 50 levels. By level 200, you’re recycling topics. LLM prompting produces plausible-looking content that falls apart under player scrutiny—categories that feel off, associations that only make sense to a machine, difficulty that swings wildly.
You’ll see it in the reviews: “repeat topics,” “too easy,” “categories don’t make sense.”
That’s the symptom. Linguabase is the fix.
One integration. Every word your players will ever need:
400K
Game-Ready Words
Know which words will frustrate players and which won’t. Blocklists separate hard profanity from soft innuendo.
100M+
Associations
Players stay longer when topics surprise them. Build on association data that goes beyond the obvious.
55 + 3
Words + Examples
55-word definitions plus 3 real examples per word. Just enough to grasp unfamiliar vocabulary in the moment.
Whether your game rewards spelling, solving, or associative leaps, it runs on lexical data. Word lists that won’t embarrass you. Definitions players actually understand. Semantic relationships that power hints, clues, and connections without giving the answer away morphologically.
This letter-circle demo shows semantic clues enhancing a spelling game. Players receive progressively specific hints—three related words that start partially revealed—guiding them toward a hidden word. Every clue is drawn from our semantic graph, filtered to avoid letter overlap with the target.
Linguabase gives you the full vocabulary stack—structured, consistent, and built for game logic. One integration. Every word your players will ever need.
A Growing Market
Gaming is a ~$200 billion global industry—larger than film and music combined. Mobile accounts for roughly half. Within mobile, puzzle games generate an estimated $10–15 billion annually. Word games are a substantial segment—likely $2–4 billion.
Word games occupy a distinct niche: smaller than mega-categories like RPGs or match-3, but characterized by high engagement and stable retention. Players return daily.
Physics + Semantics
This ball-blast demo, like NYT Connections, asks players to find hidden categories. Unlike Connections, it adds spatial reasoning: words tumble and collide, and grouping them requires physics as well as semantics. Special ball types add a tactical layer on top of the semantic core.
Semantic data lets you match by meaning instead of color or shape: players drag through “jerk,” “tug,” “snatch,” and “wrench” because they recognize these are all ways of pulling. The puzzle shifts from pattern recognition to concept recognition.
Building a word game? You need more than a word list downloaded from the internet:
Difficulty tiers — “Naptime” is familiar; “haytime” makes players pause. Our data knows the difference.
Semantic clusters — Know which words share meaning without sharing morphology. Power hints, categories, and connections.
Content safety — Filter vulgarities and innuendo before they appear in your game, not after players complain.
Here’s a different mechanic—choose the answer that matches all 4 clues:
We think there’s a wide-open design space for games that navigate meaning instead of letters. Taboo and Codenames are popular party games. The New York Times has a hit categorization puzzler. We built In Other Words, a pathfinding game where players navigate drifting word clouds to build bridges between concepts.
We analyzed the Linguabase graph: 76% of English word pairs connect in 7 hops or fewer. Average path length is 6.43 steps. Meaning-space is more navigable than people realize. “Sugar” to “peace” feels impossible, but the path exists: sugar → sweet → pleasant → calm → peace.
Whether you’re building the next Wordle or exploring semantic mechanics nobody’s tried yet, Linguabase provides the data layer.
