A Wordocious daily game mode
Famous names, places, and titles — the proper-noun puzzle
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Instead of an everyday word, the answer here is a famous name — a person, place, brand, character, or title (these are called proper nouns). A label at the top tells you which kind you are guessing. You have six tries. Type a guess of the right length, press enter, and the tiles color to guide you: PURPLE for a letter that is correct and in the right spot, AMBER for a letter in the name but a different spot, GRAY for a letter that is not in it. Two things set this apart from a normal word puzzle: the answer can be more than one word (a "first last" name shows a gap), and your guesses do NOT have to be real dictionary words — any sequence of letters of the right length is allowed, since you are spelling a name.
Stuck? Three optional hints are available, each costing 60 points: a short clue sentence about the answer (drawn from Wikipedia), a revealed vowel, and a revealed consonant. Each hint shows up as an extra row on the board, so use them sparingly.
Win base 1,000, a 300-point bonus per unused guess — tied for the richest guess bonus in the game, because names can be genuinely hard — up to 240 speed points under the five-minute cap (a tiebreaker — never worth a full guess), plus 200 completion.
Hints subtract 60 each, but each one also occupies a board row worth a full 300-point guess step, so the real cost is steeper than the sticker price. Taking all three still frequently converts a loss into a win — and a hinted win above 1,000 points beats a hintless loss at a few hundred.
Before typing anything, mine the category pill. "Athlete" plus a 6-letter answer with a gap pattern of 2+4 has shockingly few famous candidates. Brainstorm names that FIT THE SHAPE before worrying about letters.
Since guesses don’t need to be real words, you can engineer probes. But famous-name letter distributions differ from dictionary words — A and N are everywhere in names. A first guess built from A, E, N, R, S earns more than a standard opener.
Unique among hints: the Wikipedia clue costs a board row, so its value decays as rows run out. Taken at row two, it converts the puzzle from "guess any name" to "guess THIS person" with four rows to spare. Taken at row five, it leaves no room to use the knowledge.
In a "3 + 5" name, the three-letter word has very few possibilities (BOB, JAY, KIM, LEE, MAX, SAM…). Lock it, and the long word usually falls out of pop-culture memory rather than letter logic.
Want more? Read the full ProperNoundle guide or browse our strategy articles.