Prefix Hunt

You get a three-letter opening — bal, say — and twelve letters that might close it into a real four-letter word. Three of them do: bald, ball, balm. The rest are near-misses, and the closer they look the harder they are to refuse. Every word the list holds is on the rack, and the board tells you how many are left, so you always know when you are finished.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Read the opening in the status row: three letters and a blank, plus how many words finish it.
2. Focus the rack — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
3. Move between the letters with the arrow keys or WASD. The cursor steps over tiles you have already turned over, so it only ever rests on a choice you can still make.
4. Say the whole word before you commit. The tile shows a single letter; what you are judging is the four-letter word it would build.
5. Pick it with Enter or Space — or just tap the tile.
6. Right? The tile turns over with a ✓ and the word you made. Wrong? A ✕ and the word that is not one.
7. Every pick counts, right or wrong. You get one pick per word, plus a small spare allowance shown as Picks left.
8. Find them all before the picks run out.

How do you find every four-letter word that starts with the same three letters?

Go through the alphabet in order and say each candidate out loud, rather than waiting for words to come to you. Recall is unreliable and quietly skips whole regions of the alphabet; a sweep is exhaustive and takes about twenty seconds. Run "bala, balb, balc, bald" and the fourth one stops you — a word your memory would never have volunteered. Two shortcuts make the sweep quicker: try the endings that finish the most words first, and be suspicious of anything that merely feels familiar, because the letters that feel most word-like are usually ones you know from a different opening — "bale" against bake, bare and base.

The ten commonest endings, in order, are e, s, t, d, k, l, n, p, m and r. Those ten close 1101 of the 1292 words in this list — 85% of them — so sweeping them first finds most of the answers before you have spent much thought on the rest.

Are all the answers really on the rack?

Yes, always, and by construction rather than by luck. Before a round exists, every word in this site's list is grouped by its first three letters and the openings are counted. Only openings with between three and five completions are ever used — enough to be a hunt, few enough that all of them fit on the rack — and then all of them are placed. The rack is not a sample of the answer, it is the whole answer plus decoys. So the count you see is exactly reachable, and a player who knows the words wins every time.

Why do the wrong letters feel so plausible?

Because they were chosen for it. Every candidate is scored by how many real words sit one letter away from it, counted by scanning the list, and the decoys are drawn from the highest scorers. "bale" scores fourteen — dale, gale, hale, male, pale, sale, tale, vale, bile, bade, bake, bane, bare, base — which is why it is almost impossible to refuse, and why refusing it is the whole point. "balq" scores zero and fools nobody. The spare allowance is computed from that same score: a rack of convincing near-words forgives more mistakes than a rack of obvious duds, because the mistakes it causes are the puzzle working rather than you failing.

Why does a correct pick cost a pick too?

Because it keeps one number on screen instead of two, and it makes the arithmetic honest. Your allowance is the number of words plus a small spare — so knowing every answer costs you nothing at all, and the spare is exactly the room you have to be wrong in. Counting only mistakes would hide that trade behind a second counter. It also means the round always ends: the allowance is smaller than the rack, so there is never a position with tiles left, no verdict and nothing to do.

Is there any money or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. No currency, no prizes, nothing to buy, no lives to refill, and nothing here you could ever put money on. It is a word puzzle, and that is the whole of it.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both, with the same rules — which is exactly why the endings are offered rather than typed. Arrows or WASD move, Enter or Space picks, and the cursor never stops on a tile that has already been turned over, so a keyboard player walks precisely the choices a mouse player can click. Every tile is a real button whose spoken label is the whole word it would make, not the letter on its face, and the live region announces the verdict, the words found and the picks left after every move. Found and wrong tiles carry a ✓ and a ✕, so nothing depends on telling colours apart.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — the word list, the openings, the scoring and the rules. Nothing is fetched while you play, and there is no server involved at any point.

Openings are three letters long and every word is four, drawn from this site's own list of 1292 common English four-letter words. That yields 121 usable openings, each with three to five completions. The rack is always twelve letters: every completion, plus decoys sampled from the most word-like remaining candidates. The spare allowance runs from two to five depending on how convincing those decoys are. There is no timer, no streak to protect and no hint button — the count of remaining words is the only help you get, and it is enough.

Anagram Rush is the same question asked backwards: the letters are given and the words are what you have to see. Word Hunt hides real words in a grid and asks you to read a line before claiming it. Word Weave crosses two four-letter words at a single square and makes you fill both from a tray.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.