Enter a word to discover all words that differ by exactly one letter. Click any neighbor to continue exploring the network.
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Your path will appear here...
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Neighbors
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Neighbors (click to explore):
Word Ladder Challenge
Transform the start word into the target word by changing one letter at a time. Find the shortest path!
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Steps
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Valid Next Words
Find the Shortest Path
Enter two words and find the shortest word ladder between them using BFS (Breadth-First Search).
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Alt Paths
Word Network Visualization
Visualize the network of word connections around any starting word. Nodes are words, edges are single-letter changes.
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Connections
About Word Lattice
Why this project?
Word ladders were invented by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) in 1878 as a game called "Doublets." He sent them to The Saturday Review as a puzzle challenge. Since then, they've been studied by linguists, computer scientists, and puzzle enthusiasts. But most word ladder tools are either simple solvers or games — nothing lets you freely explore the vast network of word connections.
What is it?
Word Lattice is an interactive explorer for the hidden connections between English words. It treats the dictionary as a graph where each word is a node and edges connect words that differ by exactly one letter. You can navigate this network freely, solve puzzles, find optimal paths, and visualize the structure of word space.
How does it work?
Dictionary: ~15,000 English words (3-6 letters) loaded at startup, grouped by length for efficient lookup.
Neighbor finding: For any word, we check all 26 possible single-letter substitutions at each position, looking up results in the dictionary hash set.
Pathfinding: Breadth-First Search (BFS) finds the shortest path between two words. BFS is optimal for unweighted graphs.
Network visualization: Force-directed layout algorithm positions words so that connected words are close together, revealing clusters and bridges in the word network.
How to use it
Explore tab: Type a word and click "Explore" to see all its neighbors. Click any neighbor to continue navigating the network. Your path is tracked in the trail below the current word.
Challenge tab: Enter a start and target word (or click "Random Challenge") and try to find the shortest path. Click valid next words to build your ladder. A timer tracks your speed.
Path Finder tab: Enter two words and instantly see the shortest path between them, along with alternative routes of the same length.
Network tab: Enter a word and choose a depth (1-3) to visualize the network of connections. Drag nodes to rearrange the layout. Hover over nodes to see word details.