Word.ws English Dictionary

word ladder

word ladder noun: a kind of puzzle in which one word must be transformed into another specified word of the same length by changing one letter at a time, each step yielding a valid intermediate word, as in lead → load → goad → gold.

Noun

word ladder (plural word ladders)

  1. A kind of puzzle in which one word must be transformed into another specified word of the same length by changing one letter at a time, each step yielding a valid intermediate word, as in lead → load → goad → gold.
  2. (crosswording) A type of cryptic crossword clue in which the each word in the clue defines a single term each varying by a single letter, and all the terms together form a word ladder between the first half of the solution and the second half.
    • But his real genius lay in the devising of many entirely new types of crossword, some of which have found enthusiastic imitators . 'Printer's Devilry', 'Playfair', and 'Word-Ladder' , for instance, were his invention1954, The Listener
    • In the word ladder each rung is a six-letter word which has five letters in common with each of its neighbours (e.g. DISTIL, LISTED, STRIDE, EDITOR, etc). The rungs to be entered in the diagram are not clued but must be deduced from the other rungs which are1990 10, Listener and BBC Television Review
    Synonyms:
    doublet, laddergram

Synonyms of word ladder

Forms of word ladder

pluralword ladders

Questions about word ladder

What does word ladder mean?
Word ladder means a kind of puzzle in which one word must be transformed into another specified word of the same length by changing one letter at a time, each step yielding a valid intermediate word, as in lead → load → goad → gold.
What part of speech is word ladder?
Word ladder is a noun.
What is the plural of word ladder?
The plural of word ladder is word ladders.

Words near word ladder in the dictionary

  1. word hole
  2. word holes
  3. word is
  4. word is bond
  5. word it
  6. word ladder
  7. word ladders
  8. word line
  9. word lines
  10. word list
  11. word lists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: word ladder (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “word ladder.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/word_ladder. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.