A little more about us

Practice, at your own pace.

Poople Practice is an independent word-ladder game and toolkit for people who enjoy finding their way from one word to another. It pairs unlimited puzzles with a solver and a route checker.

Poople and its original game belong to their respective creators. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Play the original daily challenge at poople.io.

The dictionary behind every move

Our practice list contains 5,470 four-letter words. It is derived from word-list 4.1.0, using only entries made of four English letters. POOP is an explicit local addition because the source list filters it out.

The package is MIT licensed and credits the atebits/Words list, published under CC0. Copies of the MIT license and CC0 dedication are available here. The complete practice word list is also available as a text file.

This list includes less familiar words and inflected forms. Inclusion here means a word is playable in our tools; it is not a guarantee that the original Poople accepts it. All three tools use this same list.

How puzzles and hints work

Random puzzles draw from 686 familiar starting words that have a route to POOP. Easy puzzles have a shortest route of three or four moves, medium puzzles five or six, and hard puzzles seven or more. You can also enter your own accepted starting word.

The solver uses breadth-first search: it explores words one move away, then two moves away, and so on until it reaches the target. It returns a shortest route in this dictionary, after excluding any words you specified. When equally short routes exist, familiar words are considered first.

Your scores belong to your practice

Progress and results live in your browser's local storage. A first finish is kept for each starting word. Later attempts can improve the practice best without replacing that first record. Hints, undo and restarts affect whether a finish counts as clean.

Records do not sync between devices and are not official Poople scores. Clearing your browser data or using “Clear saved progress” removes them. See the privacy policy for details.

Image credit & feedback

The small icon beside the link to the original daily game is sourced from poople.io and belongs to the original game. The practice interface and site code are maintained separately.

Found a broken route or a confusing word? Send feedback with the word or route you tried.