Show HN: MidWord – A Word-Guessing Game
34 comments
·June 10, 2025tmulc18
Would be more fun (even if you call it "easy mode") if you had the alphabet at the top of the page! Took me 17 tries to get "prepare" but I had a lot of mistakes because I forgot what came after what in the alphabet.
salamanderman
Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.
csnizik
Very clever idea! It's difficult to come up with an original idea for a word game, but you seem to have done it. If there's one like this, I haven't seen it.
The only issue I noticed was there seems to be some lag on printing some of the results. Maybe memoizing some repetitive functions might help, if you're not already.
Nice work!
jmpavlec
A little presumptuous to say it is the world's "favorite" guessing game... But I had fun for a few words. It was nice you could press the enter key on mobile and keep the keyboard up.
Are you thinking of doing a daily word? Or just a random dictionary word each time you refresh?
minaguib
It's a random word each game (but the URL is shareable with a friend to play the same word).
TBH I've had it up as-is for a decade as a classical web app, but just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate most hosting costs.
glaucon
Out of interest what did you use (framework, or 'no framework') for the frontend-only ? Anything you feel like you've learnt from the process ?
minaguib
I've always been a backend/systems kind of guy.
For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.
The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)
veganjay
Nice! Fun game.
Similar idea, different interface: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44189814
radpanda
I think I prefer alphaguess.com’s simpler interface
pekim
I do https://wordnerd.co/secretword/ most days. It has a similar interface to alphaguess, and I prefer both of them to midword's interface.
minaguib
I like it as well - especially the logical top-input-bottom layout
gcr
It’s incredibly frustrating that only the first letter is highlighted. I was guessing tons of SU… and SV… words, but only the S had visual feedback. Bug?
minaguib
No it's intentional. The highlight is what I call a "known prefix"
It's a hint to tell you the word starts with "s", but since you didn't narrow it down to "su..." or "sv..." it's not giving you more hints.
Once you narrow it down further, say, "sub..." and "sun..." it'll highlight the known prefix "su"
pekim
It appears to highlight the letters that your guesses have narrowed it down to. For example if you had narrowed it down to after 'sudden' and before 'super', it would highlight 'su'.
ynac
I got "forth" in five guesses, first game. Which makes me feel like I'm psychic! Which would be really cool, but is it just matching the first two letters of the word or something? I'm usually terrible at these until I understand how they work.
cardamomo
Fun game! It stopped responding when I got close to guessing the secret word, though. Then I refreshed the page, and my progress was lost. With a little bit more polish, I think I can add this to my daily game rotation!
glaucon
I typed 'mountain' (without the quotes), pressed "GO" and I got a tooltip saying "only letters a-z are allowed" . This is Firefox/Windows.
glaucon
I then went back to the home page and started again and 'mountain' was accepted.
uptown
Had the same problem with a different word. Chrome / Mac.
pardner
Nicely implemented screen layout. Curious if you've thought of reporting metrics showing how many guesses it's taking people? (I got 'volatile' in 9)
minaguib
I have a decade's worth of guess statistics per word.
Unfortunately, I just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate hosting costs, so I have no good location to keep tracking these stats.
Theoretically, "Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171,476 words currently in use in the English language", the log2() of which is around 17.38 - I have no historical data for 'volatile'
SamBam
Hmmm, but the shortened dictionary being used is presumably less than that, so my best-so-far of 17 is probably below optimal...
I got "Negociate" after like 20 tries, the spelling of which I've never seen. I ended up using the hints to figure it out. When I clicked on the link of the word it took me to a "No results found for negociate!" page on Dictionary.com. Pretty frustrating, might want to double check your word list.