Double Yolk, a daily word ladder
Double Yolk is a word ladder. Lewis Carroll invented the puzzle in 1877 and called it Doublets, and his best-known example turns HEAD into TAIL a letter at a time. Omeletter's version is a ladder of nine five-letter words, each with a crossword-style clue.
How it plays
Double Yolk is the exception to the rule that the other letters must move. Only one letter changes at each step and the rest stay where they are, so every answer is the same length.
Two more things hold in almost every Double Yolk. The letter that changes is hardly ever in the same place at two steps running, and by the last word nearly every column has changed from the letter it started on, so the ladder really does get somewhere.
Because the letters stay put, the keyboard can help more here than anywhere else. Once the one difference between two neighbours is on the board, every remaining letter is settled.
A worked example
This ladder was made up for this page and is shorter than a real Double Yolk. It comes from no day's puzzle. The letter that changed is marked at each step.
- CapturedTAKENthe first answer
- GrabsTAKESN becomes S
- Bodies of fresh waterLAKEST becomes L
- Is fond ofLIKESA becomes I
- QueuesLINESK becomes N
- Joins upLINKSE becomes K
The change moves along the word: the fifth letter, then the first, the second, the third and the fourth. By LINKS every one of the five columns holds a different letter from TAKEN.
Tips
- Where the words either side of a single gap have the same letter in the same place, the word between them has it too.
- The change never stays in one column for two steps running, which rules out a lot of tempting guesses.
- Try the clue against the four letters you can already see before you look at the keyboard.
- If you are stuck in the middle, solve from the bottom up for a while. A ladder reads the same in either direction.
Double Yolk in the day's four
Omeletter sets four puzzles a day, chosen from its nine games, and every game comes round at least once in any three days. New puzzles appear at 05:00 UTC, which is mid-afternoon in Sydney and early morning in London.
You start with fifty hints in the app and five on the website, and you earn another for every puzzle you solve. On this website you can play today and the two days before it. The app keeps every day you open while it is free.
On the App Store and Google Play.
The other games
All nine are explained side by side on How to play, and every answer comes from the word list.