Word Wheel — free nine-letter word game in your browser

Nine letters, one of them in the middle, and ninety seconds. Build as many words as you can, but every word has to use the middle letter, and no letter can be used more times than it appears on the wheel. Words are four letters or longer, and the longer ones are worth far more: a seven-letter find pays six times what a four pays.

Every wheel is dealt by taking a real nine-letter word and scattering it, so the nine-letter answer is always sitting there, whether or not you spot it. The counter in the corner says how many everyday words the wheel holds, counted before the letters were dealt to you, so you always know how much is left. Rarer words, plurals and past tenses all score too; they just are not in that count. Free, instant, nothing to install.

How to play

• Tap the letters to spell a word, or just type it on a keyboard.
• Every word must contain the middle letter, and must be at least four letters long.
• Press Enter to submit. Backspace or Clear takes letters back.
• Shuffle rearranges the outer eight letters. It costs nothing.
• Scoring is 1, 2, 4, 6 and 9 points for four, five, six, seven and eight letters. The nine-letter word pays 15.
• You have ninety seconds, and a repeat never scores twice.

How to find the nine-letter word

The nine-letter word is worth 15 points, the same as fifteen four-letter words, so it is usually the difference between a good run and a great one. It is also the one word you can hunt systematically rather than wait for.

Start at the end of the word, not the start. Nine-letter words in ordinary English are usually a shorter word plus a suffix, so look at the letters you have been given and ask which ending they could spell: ING, ION, TION, MENT, ABLE, NESS, ENCE, IVE. If the wheel contains a T, an I, an O and an N you should try TION before anything else, because it eats four letters at once and leaves you a five-letter stem to recognise. The same trick works from the front with a prefix — RE, UN, IN, DIS, CON, PRE.

The second habit is to separate the vowels from the consonants on sight. Nine letters with only two vowels is a word with a heavy consonant cluster in it, which usually means a compound or a prefix; five vowels means something Latinate with alternating syllables. Counting them takes a second and narrows what you are hunting for.

The middle letter is worth using as an anchor. Because it is compulsory, you can stop scanning the whole wheel and instead run through the positions it could occupy: is it a starting letter, does it sit before a common ending, does it double. If it is an S, every plural on the wheel counts; if it is a vowel you can build almost anything; if it is a K or a W the wheel will be tight, and a four-letter word is a perfectly respectable answer there. If you would rather trace words on a grid than build them from a pile, Word Hunt is the same ninety seconds with a different verb, and Word Scramble gives you one word's letters and asks for the anagram.

More games

More from 🔤 Word games:

• Word Ladder — Change one letter at a time to climb from one four-letter word to another. Every rung has to be a real word.
• Daily Word — Guess the secret 5-letter word in 6 tries. One puzzle a day — same word for everyone. Keep your streak alive!
• Word Search — Find 10 hidden words in a fresh themed grid — every direction, even backwards. Race the clock and beat your best time.
• Word Scramble — Sixty seconds of anagrams. Four letters to start — seven by the time you're good at it.
• Hangman — Six wrong guesses, one word at a time. Solve it and the next word gets a letter longer.

Or browse all games.