About Nounable

Nounable is a free daily word game with a twist: instead of guessing a common word, you hunt for a secret proper noun: a specific person, place, film, band, brand, landmark, or fictional character. There is one puzzle a day, everyone in the world gets the same answer, and every guess you make is instantly ranked by how semantically close it is to the secret. The answer is rank #1; your job is to climb down from rank 20,000 to rank 1 in as few guesses as possible.

How the similarity ranking works

Under the hood, every one of Nounable's roughly 35,000 known entities is represented as a text embedding: a list of numbers that captures what that entity means based on how it is described and discussed. When you make a guess, the game computes the cosine similarity between your guess's embedding and the answer's embedding, then counts how many of the other entities are closer. That count is your rank. It is the same core idea behind modern search engines and AI language models, turned into a game mechanic: “Paris” sits near “Eiffel Tower” in this space, while “Beyoncé” sits very far away.

Because the ranking comes from a mathematical model of meaning rather than a hand-written trivia database, it sometimes surprises you, and learning to predict it is most of the fun. If you want the full rules, scoring math, and strategy, see the how to play guide.

Why it exists

Nounable is an independent project by a solo developer, inspired by semantic guessing games like Contexto and Semantle. Those games proved how addictive “hot and cold” with word embeddings can be, but they focus on common words. Proper nouns felt like the more natural playground: everyone has a mental map of celebrities, cities, movies, and brands, and triangulating “somewhere between Tokyo and Nintendo” is a different kind of puzzle than guessing a dictionary word. So Nounable was built: one tight daily puzzle, golf-style scoring against par, streaks, and a growing archive of past puzzle answers.

The game is free to play, requires no account, and stores your progress and streaks automatically via anonymous sign-in.

Contact

Questions, bug reports, or ideas for the entity list? Email nuancedpcm@gmail.com.