What is QuelMot?
QuelMot is a French semantic word game where one secret word is hidden each day and every guess receives a proximity score from -999 to 1000 based on meaning rather than letters. Type any French word and the score tells you how semantically close it is to the answer, with 1000 marking a win. The word changes at noon Paris time, drawn from a dictionary of over 90,000 common French words, and everyone plays the same one. Scores come from a vector model trained on more than a billion French words. QuelMot extends the semantic puzzle format with training mode, blind mode, daily and weekly leaderboards, a free hint page, and an archive of past words.
How to play QuelMot
- Open the daily board and type any French word into the guess field. There is no length to match, no letter requirement, and no wrong answer.
- Read the proximity score between -999 and 1000, and watch the temperature bar shift from blue for cold through yellow and red to gold for solved.
- Start broad with category words like objet, animal, lieu, or sentiment to identify the lexical field the answer occupies.
- Chase the highest scores. Once a word passes 300 you have a lead, so explore its synonyms, context, parts, and category.
- Change field completely after about ten guesses with no progress, rather than digging deeper in the same direction.
- Return after noon Paris time for the next word, or switch to training mode to play another round immediately.
Reading the feedback
Each guess returns a proximity score from -999 to 1000 and moves a temperature bar from blue (cold) through yellow (warm) and red (burning) to gold when you solve it. In the site’s example, soleil is the answer: pizza scores 42 for having no relation, mer scores 189 for a vague connection, chaleur scores 467 for sharing a context, lumière scores 782 for a direct link, ciel scores 923 for being very close, and soleil scores 1000 because it is correct. A wrong guess only adds a line to the list and one mark to the attempt counter.
Game modes
QuelMot propose trois modes. Mot du jour est le mot quotidien, publié à midi, heure de Paris, et le même pour tous les joueurs. Les classements du jour et de la semaine comparent les résultats. Avec Mode entraînement, vous pouvez jouer quand vous voulez parmi 30 mots par niveau, de facile à expert. Mode aveugle masque le score et ne laisse que la barre de température pour vous guider.
La proximité sémantique n’est pas la synonymie.
High scores indicate shared context, not identical meaning. Opposites can score highly because they appear in the same contexts: if the answer is chaud, froid will be very close. A high score points to the topic, not the direction. Plurals, conjugations, and gendered forms each have their own score, so vague and vagues, beau and belle return different numbers. If a word looks promising, it is worth testing both forms.
The answer is always a base form: singular, masculine, or infinitive. Its plural is the only other form that can also win, so a conjugated verb will never close the game, however high it scores. The dictionary rejects proper nouns, brands, acronyms, SMS slang, and foreign words. A rejected word is missing from the 90,000-word list; it is not simply a cold guess.
Tips for a more efficient search
The word changes at noon rather than at midnight, so a morning routine built around other daily games will land on yesterday's word here. When you stall, the daily hint page gives three words close to the answer with their scores, free and without revealing it, which reopens a search that has gone in circles.
The site states there is no cap on attempts and no cap on sessions, and it puts the average at forty to fifty guesses to find the daily word. A win usually runs ten to twenty minutes; a bad day runs longer. The web version is free, carries no ads, and asks for no registration. Signing in with Google is optional and syncs statistics and leaderboard placement across devices. The archive page lists every past daily word with its statistics.