What is Wendel?
Wendel is a daily multilingual word guessing game inspired by Semantle.
Your clue is how words relate by meaning.
Each guess is given ranked similarity showing how close you are to the mystery word, and plots how closely your guesses relate to each other
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How to play
Guess any word to start. There are no wrong guesses, each one usually clues you in a little more to the round's mystery word.
You earn points per guess, with bonuses for moving closer to the mystery word, trying a new language, or landing in a warm or hot zone:
- Top 10 very close
- Top 100 warm
- Top 1000 in the neighborhood
- Cold keep exploring
The mystery word is always English, but you can guess in German, Portuguese, Arabic, Bangla, or Hindi. The closest match in any language still counts, so Hund, cão, كلب, কুকুর, or कुत्ता all win when the word is dog.
Translations & processing
Wendel uses Google's EmbeddingGemma to determine how close two words are in meaning (the same system that drives many agentic RAG and LLM memory systems). It is a lightweight way to get a sense of how models like Gemini see the world. The result is used to create the similarity score and rank for each guess.
The left-to-right position on the plot comes from projecting the 768-dimensional vector down to 2 dimensions, which is a lossy process, but often just enough to act as a clue.
English translations may be missing or off at times, but are included where available. Mostly from the English Wiktionary via kaikki.org (Ylonen, Wiktextract, LREC 2022), with any gaps filled in by the Google Cloud Translation API (v2).