- Ristikkotupa
- Games
- Letter Wheel
Five, six or seven letters sit on a wheel. Among them hides a word that uses every letter, and a handful of shorter words live in the same set. Spell them by swiping across the wheel and watch the little grid fill up.
How Letter Wheel works
Spell a word by dragging across the letters in order and letting go, or by tapping them one after another and pressing the button in the middle. Each letter on the wheel can be used once per word, and a word needs at least three letters.
If the word belongs in the grid, it drops into its place. If it is a real word that the grid does not need, it is kept as a bonus word. The puzzle is solved when every place in the grid is filled. Easy has five letters and four to six grid words, Medium six letters and six to eight words, Hard seven letters and eight to ten words.
The grid always holds the word that uses all the letters, every grid word is a common word, and every accepted word that can be spelled from the wheel is either in the grid or counted as a bonus, so nothing you find goes to waste.
Ways to read the wheel
- Look for the long word first. Read the letters as a scrambled word and try familiar endings: -ing, -ed and -er in English, -are and -ore in Italian, -ás and -ség in Hungarian, -inen and -us in Finnish.
- Shuffle when you are stuck. The shuffle button puts the letters in a new order round the wheel, and a new order often shows the word your eyes kept skipping.
- Let the grid tell you the lengths. Every empty place shows how many letters its word has. Three empty three-letter places mean three short words still to find.
- Change one letter of a word you have. If you found a four-letter word, try swapping one of its letters for an unused letter on the wheel.
- Bonus words are free practice. They do not fill the grid, but they keep your eye on the letter pairs the grid words also use.
Questions about Letter Wheel
Why was my word not accepted?
It may have fewer than three letters, use a letter more often than it is on the wheel, or be missing from the word list. Names and abbreviations are not in the lists.
What are bonus words?
Real words spelled from the wheel that are not part of the grid. They are counted and shown in the result, but the puzzle only needs the grid words.
Is there always a word with every letter?
Yes. Every wheel is built around a common word that uses all of its letters, and that word is always in the grid.
Can I type instead of swiping?
Yes. On a keyboard, type the letters and press Enter; Space shuffles the wheel.
Which words count in Finnish?
Finnish accepts base forms only, so ‘talo’ counts but ‘talossa’ does not. That keeps the lists tidy, although some everyday inflected forms are left out.