Every word is a fossil. Dig it up in two moves.
Why cut a word apart?
Every English word is a small archaeological site. On the surface it's one smooth unit — window, muscle, nightmare — but dig down and it splits into older pieces, often from languages that stopped being spoken centuries ago. Dig is about making that first cut: finding the seams where a word was joined together, then naming what each piece originally meant.
The payoff is the small shock of recognition. Window is Old Norse vindauga, literally a “wind-eye” — the hole that let smoke out and weather in. Muscle is Latin musculus, a “little mouse,” because a flexing bicep looked like a mouse moving under the skin. Nightmare isn't a bad dream about a horse; the mare was an Old English demon believed to sit on sleepers' chests. Once you've seen a few, you can't stop seeing them.
Each piece is colour-coded by its stratum — the layer of English it comes from, whether Old English, Norse, Latin, French, Greek, or Arabic. Play enough days and you start to feel a word's origin before you're told, the way you'd learn rock layers by digging through them. A new word is excavated each day; the ones already played live in the word archive.