What Is a Word Ladder? Rules, Examples & Where to Play Daily
A word ladder is a word puzzle where you turn one word into another by changing one letter at a time, and every step along the way must be a real word. The goal is to reach the target word in as few steps as possible. Lewis Carroll invented it in 1877 and called it "Doublets."
The rules
Every word ladder follows the same three rules:
- Change exactly one letter per step. You can't add, remove or rearrange letters. FEEL to FEET is legal; FEEL to FLEE is not.
- Every step must be a real word. No made-up words, no abbreviations, and usually no proper nouns.
- Fewer steps is better. Any path that reaches the target solves the puzzle, but the shortest possible path, called par, is the real challenge.
Most daily word ladders use four-letter words. They're short enough that a puzzle takes a couple of minutes, and there are enough of them (a few thousand common ones) that almost any two words can be connected.
A word ladder example
Here's a real puzzle from Feetle #4: turn VILE into FEET. The shortest path takes five steps:
VILE → FILE → FILL → FELL → FEEL → FEET
Notice the detour: FILE becomes FILL, changing the last letter to something that isn't in FEET, just to unlock FELL on the next step. Short-term moves away from the target are often the only way through, and that's what makes word ladders harder than they look.
Where word ladders come from
Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, invented the puzzle on Christmas Day 1877 to entertain two young friends. He named it Doublets and published a series of them in Vanity Fair in 1879. His most famous example turns HEAD into TAIL:
HEAD → HEAL → TEAL → TELL → TALL → TAIL
The puzzle has gone by other names since, including word golf, laddergrams and word chains, but "word ladder" is the one that stuck, because you climb one rung at a time.
Word ladder vs Wordle
Both are short daily word games, but they test different skills:
| Word ladder (Feetle) | Wordle | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Reach a known target word | Find a hidden word |
| Each turn | Change one letter | Guess a whole word |
| Guesses | Unlimited; fewer is better | Six |
| Skill | Vocabulary and planning ahead | Deduction from color clues |
| Time | About 2 minutes | About 3 minutes |
If Wordle feels like detective work, a word ladder feels like a maze: you can see the exit, the hard part is finding the route.
Where to play a word ladder every day
- Feetle: a new four-letter start word every day, and the target is always FEET. Free, no account, with streaks and stats.
- Poople: the same idea with the target POOP. Feetle was inspired by it.
- Weaver: a daily four-letter ladder with a different start and end word each day.
Stuck on today's Feetle? The Feetle hints page gives three spoiler-free clues before revealing the shortest path.
Try today's word ladder →