The people behind the grids
About WordiBop
WordiBop is a free home for handmade word puzzles — 12 games and counting, no signup, no downloads, no paywall. It is made by two people who have been building puzzles for a living long enough to have opinions about what makes a good one.
- 12 word games live and free, from word search to word chains
- 2 people who write, build and test every one of them
- 0 accounts, downloads, paywalls or daily rations
Two people, not a puzzle factory
Most puzzle sites you land on are either a syndication feed with a logo stuck on top, or an endless scroll of machine-generated grids nobody has ever solved. WordiBop is neither. Every game here was designed, built, played and argued about by the two of us — and when a puzzle turns out to be unfair, there is nobody else to blame.
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Brian Hamilton
Puzzle site creator and web developer
Builds the machinery: the generators that deal each grid, the solvers that prove a puzzle is fair before anyone sees it, the hint systems, and the layouts that behave the same on a phone and a laptop. An internet engineering degree and thirty years of development behind him, most of it spent on web-based games and puzzle tools.
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Karan Hamilton
Puzzle designer and game tester
Decides whether a puzzle is any good. Game ideas, difficulty calibration, the wording of every rule and instruction, and the testing pass that catches the clue nobody outside the room would understand. Her rule of thumb — a puzzle should be inviting before it is difficult — is why the easy tiers here are genuinely easy.
Fuller profiles — background, published work, the puzzle opinions we will not be talked out of — live on our publisher's authors page.
Who publishes WordiBop
WordiBop is published by Hamilton Digital Media Limited, a two-person puzzle publisher registered in England and Wales (company number 15608219) and based in Wimborne, Dorset. The company makes word, logic and brain-training puzzles across the web, Android and printed books — WordiBop is the word-puzzle corner of it.
That matters for one practical reason: the crossword clue database, the word lists and the generator code behind these games did not appear overnight. They are the accumulated working material of sites that have been running for years, which is why a brand-new site can open with 12 finished games instead of one and a promise.
The rest of the network
- Word Search Online Themed word searches, the site WordiBop grew out of.
- Easy Crosswords Approachable crosswords with fair, plain-English clues.
- Puzzle Workout Logic, deduction and brain-training puzzles.
- Detective Puzzles Whodunnit-style deduction cases.
- Print Puzzles Printable puzzle packs for paper solvers.
- Sudoku for Kids Gentle sudoku sized for younger solvers.
How a puzzle gets onto this site
The short version: a computer deals the grid, but a person decides what it is allowed to deal, and a second program has to prove the result is solvable before you ever see it. Three habits do most of the work.
Difficulty is measured, never declared
Calling a puzzle "hard" because it is long is the oldest lie in the genre. We score difficulty by having software actually solve the thing. Every hangman word is played out by a solver using perfect strategy, and the number of wrong guesses that costs is the word's rating — which is how you learn that short common words like JAZZ are brutal and long ones are gentle. Cryptogram quotes are graded on how much purchase they give a solver, then split into easy, medium and hard at the corpus's own boundaries, which is why the short quotes end up in hard. Nothing is labelled by hand and hoped for.
Fairness is proved, not assumed
Every codeword grid is cracked by a logic solver from its own starting letters before it is dealt — if the solver cannot finish it with forced deductions alone, the grid is binned, and a completed solve is also proof that the answer is unique. Anagram crosswords go further: because an anagram clue is ambiguous by design (one clue can fit POST, POTS, SPOT, STOP and TOPS), each finished grid is turned into a constraint problem and the number of valid fills is counted. Anything other than exactly one and the puzzle is thrown away. Word ladders ship with a par that is the proven shortest route, re-verified against the dictionary on every build.
Word lists are vetted, twice
Dictionary files are full of things you do not want in a puzzle: proper nouns, abbreviations, plausible-looking junk from tournament word lists, and the handful of words nobody wants their child to find in a grid. Words that get displayed — ladder rungs, revealed answers, crossword clues — have to be vouched for by an editor's list as well as a dictionary. Words you are merely allowed to guess can be looser. Slurs are never shipped at all, in any list, for any game.
What we promise
- Free, permanently Every puzzle on WordiBop is playable in full, for free. There is no premium tier waiting to appear, and no daily ration designed to make you want one. Ads pay for the hosting.
- No account, ever There is nothing to sign up for. Your stats, streaks, best times and settings live in your own browser's storage — we never receive them, and clearing your site data deletes them for good.
- Nothing ships half-finished A game goes live when it is genuinely good — a real playable puzzle plus a proper written guide. Until then it stays an honest "coming soon" page rather than a thin one competing for your click.
- Written by us Every article on this site is written for this site. No spun text, no recycled copy from our other sites, no filler questions padding out a page nobody asked.
Tell us when we get it wrong
A clue that misleads, a word list with a mistake in it, a grid that will not behave on your phone — we would genuinely rather hear about it than not. Two people can fix things quickly, and puzzle errors are the kind of thing that quietly annoys a hundred solvers before anyone mentions it.