Glottle

How to play

Find the mystery language on the world's language family tree. Any of Glottolog's 8,618 languages is a valid guess; you get 15 attempts on Easy, 30 on Medium, 50 on Hard, 75 on Expert. Each level widens the pool the answer is drawn from, from languages everyone knows out to the deep cuts.

Each guess names the most recent common ancestor it shares with the answer, and how warm that makes it:

• Boiling — very close relative
• Hot — same branch
• Warm — same sub-family
• Cool — same major branch
• Cold — same family, only just
• Freezing — unrelated

Each guess also says how far the answer lies from it, and which way — the direction you would read off a map, holding one heading the whole way. Both are measured between the two languages' homelands, the single point Glottolog places each one at: English sits in England, however far it has since travelled.

Hints (region, word order, its word for “water”) cost one attempt each. Reveal a branch uncovers the next level of the answer's lineage for half your remaining attempts. Daily is one shared puzzle, changing at midnight UTC. Infinite gives you a fresh language whenever you start it — and Answers from can narrow its draw to one language family, region, or country.