About

Words Ago is a daily word game about the history of words. Each puzzle shows how often one word appeared in books between 1820 and 2019, and you name the word in six guesses. Every answer comes with a short, sourced story of how the word rose and fell.

Answers are chosen by hand. A good answer is a word most people know, with a curve that has a clear shape, and a true story we can source. Easier words with famous histories come early in the week; Sundays are hardest.

Data and credits

Word frequencies come from the Google Books Ngram datasets (version 20200217), licensed CC BY 3.0. Words Ago is independent and not affiliated with Google. The word list is built from 12dicts by Alan Beale, released to the public domain. The list of words we don’t allow comes from the “List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words” (CC BY 4.0). Story facts are checked against the sources linked on each story page. See how the data works.

Contact

Questions, corrections and ideas: hello@wordsago.com.