How to Play Nounable
Nounable is a free daily guessing game about proper nouns. Every day there is one secret answer: it might be a person, a city, a movie, a band, a brand, a landmark, or a fictional character. Your job is to find it, and the game tells you how close every guess is.
Unlike a trivia quiz, there are no questions and no clues to start with. You simply type a proper noun, and Nounable ranks it by semantic similarity to the secret answer among roughly 35,000 well-known entities. The answer itself is rank #1. A guess that ranks #14 is extremely close; a guess that ranks #22,000 is nowhere near. You triangulate your way to the answer, guess by guess, using those ranks as a compass.
The rules
- One puzzle per day. Everyone gets the same answer, and the puzzle resets at midnight local time.
- Guess any proper noun the game recognizes; an autocomplete helps you pick from the known entities.
- Each guess is instantly ranked from 1 (the answer) to about 35,000 (as unrelated as it gets).
- There is no guess limit. You win the moment you name the answer; the goal is to do it in as few guesses as possible.
- Stuck? Take a hint. Hints reveal an entity that ranks closer than your best guess so far, but each one adds a scoring penalty.
Reading the ranks: color bands
Every guess is color-coded so you can read distance at a glance:
- 1–300: Very close. You are circling the answer: same niche, same neighborhood.
- 300–1,000: Getting warmer. Right area of the map, wrong block.
- 1,000–5,000: Cold. Some faint connection, but you should change direction.
- 5,000+: Far off. Abandon this line of thinking entirely.
A worked example
Suppose the secret answer is the Eiffel Tower. You open the puzzle knowing nothing, so you start broad:
- You guess Beyoncé, and it comes back deep in the red, rank 20,000-something. A pop star has almost nothing in common with the answer, so you rule out music and celebrities.
- You try Japan: orange, a few thousand. A place! Better, but the wrong part of the world.
- Paris lands in the green, very close (under rank 300). Now you know the answer lives in or around Paris.
- Louvre ranks even closer. You are down to famous Paris landmarks, and on the next guess, Eiffel Tower hits rank #1. Solved in five.
That is the whole rhythm of the game: probe with broad categories, follow the warm colors, then narrow ruthlessly.
Hints and scoring
Nounable scores like golf. Every puzzle has a par: the number of guesses a solid solver should need, typically in the high 20s. Your score is simply:
score = guesses taken + hint penalties
Hints get more expensive the more you lean on them: the first hint costs +2, the second +4, the third +6, and so on. So if you solve a par-28 puzzle in 20 guesses with two hints, your score is 20 + 2 + 4 = 26, two under par. Under par is excellent, at par is solid, and over par just means tomorrow is another chance.
Finish the daily puzzle each day to build a streak, and use the share button to post your result; it shows your score against par without spoiling the answer for anyone.
Strategy tips
- Open with category probes. First guesses like a famous person, a country, a movie, and a company quickly tell you what kind of thing the answer is.
- Follow the gradient, not your gut. If two guesses both feel plausible, trust whichever ranked lower. The number is the ground truth.
- Use near-misses as pivots. A green guess is a map pin. Ask: what is adjacent to this (same country, same franchise, same era, same industry)?
- Think in clusters. The embedding space groups things by how the world talks about them: 90s sitcoms cluster together, Renaissance painters cluster together, European capitals cluster together.
- Don't fear the hint. A single +2 hint that saves you eight wild guesses is a bargain. Just avoid chaining hints; the penalties escalate fast.
- Practice off the record. Replaying earlier dailies from Previous games, or playing infinite mode, is the fastest way to develop an intuition for how the similarity ranking behaves.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a proper noun in Nounable?
Any specific, named thing: a person (Taylor Swift), a place (Tokyo), a movie or TV show (The Matrix), a company or brand (Nike), a landmark (Eiffel Tower), a fictional character (Sherlock Holmes), a band, a video game, an event, and so on. Common nouns like “dog” or “happiness” are not in the game; the answer is always one of roughly 35,000 well-known named entities.
Why did my guess rank far away when it seems related?
Nounable ranks guesses using text embeddings: a numerical representation of what each entity means, learned from how it is written about. Similarity is measured mathematically (cosine similarity between embeddings), not by simple word association. Two things you associate personally can still live far apart in the model’s map of meaning, and the rank also depends on how many of the other ~35,000 entities happen to sit closer to the answer than your guess does. It usually reflects category, era, profession, and context more than one-off connections.
When does a new puzzle come out?
A new puzzle arrives once a day, rolling over at midnight in your local time zone. Everyone playing on the same calendar day gets the same secret answer.
Is Nounable free?
Yes. Nounable is completely free to play: no account, no sign-up, and no payment. The site is supported by ads.
Can I play old puzzles?
Yes. Open Previous games on the play screen to replay any earlier daily puzzle. And if you just want to know what an answer was, the past answers archive lists every previous puzzle by number and date.
What is infinite mode?
Infinite (unlimited) mode is a way to keep playing beyond the single daily puzzle, with a fresh random answer each round. It is being added to Nounable. The daily puzzle remains the shared, streak-counting main event.
Do I need an account to keep my streak?
No. Nounable signs you in anonymously in the background and stores your progress and streaks automatically. Your streak survives page reloads and return visits on the same device without you ever creating an account.
What is a good score?
Anything at or under par is a strong result; par is deliberately tight, like a golf course rating. Beating par usually means you narrowed in efficiently with smart category guesses and used few or no hints.
Ready? Play today's puzzle.