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DONATE ON KO-FISinuetto is a daily word game where you guess a word by looking at its phonetic wave: a curve generated by the sounds that make it up. A new puzzle every day.
Each sound has a characteristic wave shape — open and close vowels, consonants, fricatives and so on — which you can learn to recognise using the guide at the bottom of the page. The target wave is hidden at first: you deduce it from the feedback you receive with each guess.
Type a 5-letter word. Each sound in your guess is compared to the corresponding sound in the secret word, and displayed differently based on the result: the amplitude of each segment changes on the main wave, and the colour of the tiles next to the word changes accordingly:
🟩 Full-height wave / Green tile — the sound is in the right position.
🟨 Half-height wave / Yellow tile — the sound is in the word, but in a different position.
⬜ Flat wave / Gray tile — the sound is not in the word.
As you identify correct positions, the corresponding segments of the target wave light up. You have 6 attempts. You can click on any word in the list to toggle its wave on or off in the main display.
Remember: think in categories and sounds, not letters!
It's possible that the waves of a guess match those of the secret word, yet the word itself is wrong. If this happens, you're very close: focus on phonetic categories rather than spelling and you'll get there.
A 5-letter word does not necessarily have 5 phonemes. The number of sounds is shown in the display.
Note: this game uses the ARPABET transcription of American English.
Stars are earned only by finding the word, and depend on the number of attempts used:
No stars if you run out of attempts or give up. Each tip used costs 1 star — but the last remaining star is only lost by losing the game or surrendering: even using all your tips, winning always earns at least one star.
You have 1 or 2 tips per game (2 for words with 4 or more sounds). Click the tip button and the wave splits into clickable segments: click a segment to reveal its phoneme and light up that portion of the target wave.
At the bottom of the page you'll find the phonetic guide: it shows the characteristic wave shape for each type of sound used in Sinuetto. Use it to learn to read the wave and narrow down your candidates.
Use the navigation buttons to access previous days' puzzles and play them at any time.