What is Commoner?
Commoner is a daily word-ranking puzzle that asks you to order five words from most to least common in everyday English. Each round takes about a minute: reorder five word cards and submit your guess. Frequency data come from the wordfreq English corpus. You have three tries to place all words correctly.
How to play Commoner
- Drag a card to reorder it, or tap two cards to swap their positions.
- Press Submit to check your current order. The interface shows remaining tries.
- Correct ranks lock green permanently. Incorrect ranks flash yellow briefly, then fade. You cannot place the same word in a rank position you already tried.
Reading the feedback
When you submit a guess, correctly placed words lock green and stay locked. An incorrect rank flashes yellow for about a second, then fades with no lasting mark. Unsolved ranks remain white. The interface displays remaining tries and shows your full guess history as a color grid once you solve or exhaust all attempts.
Tips for ordering words
Use green-locked words as fixed anchors. They cannot change, so later guesses need only adjust the remaining positions.
If a submit flashes yellow, change the positions that were newly tried. The yellow flash identifies which ranks were wrong but does not persist on the board.
Avoid placing the same word in the same rank across tries. The game disallows repeating a word in a position you have already tested, so each submission must explore a new arrangement for incorrectly placed words.
Why play Commoner
Play Commoner to test your intuition about everyday word frequencies in a quick, daily challenge. The simple drag-or-tap interface and immediate color feedback let you iterate through focused guesses and compare your sense of common usage against corpus-verified data. The three-try limit and permanent green locks add a layer of strategy to an otherwise straightforward ranking task.