Rootles

Rootles is a small collection of daily word games about the roots of English — the buried Latin, Greek, Norse, French, and Old English pieces that quietly assemble the words we use every day. Most word games reward the spellings you already know. Rootles is about the layer underneath: why a word means what it means, and how words that look nothing alike turn out to be cousins.

The idea

English is a borrowing language. It has spent fifteen centuries absorbing vocabulary from everywhere it touched, and the seams are still visible if you know where to look. Fracture, fragment, and infringe all carry the Latin frangere, "to break," even though only one of them still looks like it. Transfer and relate share the same root for "carry" wearing two different masks. Once you start noticing these patterns — a prefix that shifts its spelling to fit the next sound, a root that surfaces as duct in one word and duce in another — you can't stop. Rootles is built to give you that habit, a few minutes at a time.

The games

There are six, each taking a different angle on the same material. Graft asks you to hop from one word to another by a shared root, finding hidden routes between two distant words. Dig has you cut a single word at its seams and match each piece to its meaning. Grow plants one ancient root and challenges you to grow as many English words from it as you can. Germinate asks you to trace each part of a word back to the language it came from. Branch traces a word's family tree, from its Proto-Indo-European root down through Germanic or Latin to the modern English word. Mint hands you a set of ancient roots and endings and asks you to coin brand-new words that don't exist yet. A new puzzle for each appears every day (Saturdays rest), the same for everyone, so you can compare notes.

The six strata

Throughout the games you'll see a recurring palette: six colors standing for the six great layers of English vocabulary — Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Old French, Greek, and Arabic. The colors aren't decoration; they're a quiet teaching tool. Handle enough words and you start to feel which stratum a word came from before you're told — the same way you'd learn rock layers by digging through them.

How it's made

Rootles runs entirely in your browser — there are no accounts, and your progress and streaks stay on your device. The word data is checked against Wiktionary rather than guessed: every game's answers are run against a full copy of Wiktionary's etymology data, and every answer links to the entry it came from, so nothing has to be taken on my word. Where Wiktionary hedges, the game says so; where a claim couldn't be supported at all, the word was removed rather than patched. The section below gives the breakdown game by game, including where the evidence is thinner than I'd like. Word data derived from Wiktionary is used under CC BY-SA 4.0; the games and their code are my own. The site is free to play, supported by ads; how that works, and your choices around it, are described in the privacy policy.

How the word data is derived

Everything the games assert about a word comes from the English Wiktionary. Nothing is written from memory, and nothing is invented to fill a gap — where Wiktionary doesn't support a claim, the word is dropped rather than guessed at. But the games don't all lean on it equally hard, so here is the honest breakdown. Derived means the answer was read directly out of Wiktionary's own structured etymology data. Checked means it was drafted first and then confirmed against the Wiktionary entry. Weaker means it rests on a reasonable inference that Wiktionary doesn't state outright. A word also counts when it is simply another form of one already verified — jest alongside jester, gestate alongside gestation — but only when Wiktionary's own entry for it confirms the connection.

Two things those numbers don't tell you, and both matter. The first is that the checking was done by machine, against the Wiktionary text — not by a person sitting with a reference library. It is far better than writing etymologies from memory, which is what I'd be doing otherwise, and it is not the same thing as expert review. The second is that a few honest editorial choices sit on top of the data: Branch's wall has five courses, so some lineages fold an attested in-between stage into one step and say simplified where they do; Germinate has to pick one layer to call a piece's origin when its chain passes through several, and accepts the others as correct too; and where Wiktionary itself hedges, the games mark the answer disputed rather than pretend to certainty.

Grow no longer carries a weaker tier at all: the words that used to rest on "an earlier audit said so" have each been re-checked — most now cite their own Wiktionary entry, and the ~850 that couldn't be supported were removed, with the reason recorded. Dig's weaker third are the cuts where the seam has eroded past the point Wiktionary marks it (sheriff was shire + reeve), so the split is read out of the etymology's prose instead. A further ~2,700 Grow words whose evidence disagrees with itself, and ~20,000 more resting on Wiktionary's vaguest “derived from” links, are held out of the game entirely until they can be checked one at a time.

Every answer links to its Wiktionary page, so none of this has to be taken on trust — you can open the entry and see for yourself. Errors will still be in there. When one gets found it gets fixed, and the correction reaches everyone the same day, so tell me when you catch one.

Who made it

Rootles is an independent project made by one person who likes etymology a little too much. It's still growing — new roots and refinements land regularly. If you spot a wrong root, a puzzle that feels off, or just have an idea, I'd genuinely like to hear it: isaacsavona@gmail.com.