Anagrams, word ladders, vocabulary and recall games — free, no signup, no download
These are word games rather than spelling tests. Most of them use words you already know and measure how fast you can reach them, which is a genuinely different skill from having a large vocabulary — and the one that makes conversation feel fluent or effortful.
Recognition is the easiest: picking the right meaning from options. Word Match and Missing Letter both live here, and your recognition vocabulary is several times larger than your production vocabulary.
Retrieval is harder: producing a word from a cue. Fill the Blank and Word Recall ask for this, and it is the difference between knowing an answer and being able to say it.
Generation is hardest: producing words to a constraint with no target in mind. Word Sprint asks for as many valid words as you can make from a letter set, and it is the most demanding format here.
Rearrangement sits alongside all three. Anagram Hunt, Word Scramble and Unscramble Race all test how fast a jumble resolves into a word, which is its own skill.
For anagrams, look for common endings first — ING, ION, EST, TION. Lock the ending and the rest usually falls out. Then pull the vowels out; English constrains their positions hard.
For word ladders, change vowels before consonants. Vowel substitutions produce valid words far more often, and Lewis Carroll's original Doublets puzzles from 1877 work exactly the same way.
For word search, hunt the rarest letter in the target rather than the first. Searching for a Q or an X narrows the field dramatically compared with searching for an S.
For recall games, build a story. Linking words into a narrative typically doubles what people recall from a list, and it is one of the oldest and best-evidenced mnemonic techniques there is.
Vocabulary Builder uses spaced repetition and testing rather than re-reading, because being tested on something strengthens retention more than studying it again does. That finding — the testing effect — is among the best supported in learning research.
Ten to twenty new words a day is sustainable for most people. More than that tends to collapse retention rather than accelerate it.
Use a new word in a sentence of your own. Generating a context is substantially stronger than reading a definition, and it takes five seconds.
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Vocabulary Builder, which uses spaced repetition. The others exercise words you already know rather than teaching new ones.
Look for common endings first — ING, ION, EST, TION — then place the vowels. Speed comes from recognising chunks, not from rearranging letters faster.
They are visual search exercises rather than vocabulary ones, since the words are given to you. Enjoyable, but not a vocabulary workout.
Lewis Carroll, in 1877, under the name Doublets. The rule — change one letter at a time, every step a real word — is unchanged.