Echoes
Reach the target word, one sound change at a time. Follow your ears.
Preparing today’s sound ladder…
The pronunciation data didn't load. Check your connection and try again.
How to revise your route
Undo freely, or select an earlier word to revise from there. Reaching the target finishes the route.
Choose your next echo
Each card is one valid sound change from your current word.
The written sound spellings are the rule and work without audio. “Hear” uses a device voice as a preview. Echoes currently checks one North American dictionary pronunciation, so regional pronunciations can differ.
Undo is free. Hints reveal an operation, then a sound, then a next word. Distance checks are stronger help. Every help action stays recorded after revision.
You made it
Your route
🟩 hop toward the target on a shortest route · 🟨 detour hop · ◯ free homophone flourish · • help used
Next puzzle at midnight: …
Show one par route
One shortest route using the common-word edition:
Earlier daily ladders
Earlier ladders are practice. Your daily score stays separate.
A 30-second sound lesson
CAT → COT changes one vowel sound. CAT → DOG changes three sounds. Which is one move from CAT?
How Echoes works
What counts as one sound
Echoes runs on pronunciations, not spellings. Every word is mapped to its primary US English pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and the unit of play is the phoneme, a single speech sound. One move may add a sound, drop a sound, or swap one sound for another; anything more is two moves.
CAT (KAT) to CUT (KUHT) is one move: the vowel swaps and nothing else changes.
Spellings can differ even when the pronunciations are close. THREE (THREE) to THROUGH (THROO) rewrites most of the letters, but to the ear it is still a single sound changing. Every daily ladder hides at least one hop like that on a shortest route.
Why ADVISOR to ADVISER is free
Both spellings share the pronunciation ADVYZUR, so hopping between them changes zero sounds, so Echoes does not count it as a move.
Par is the fewest one-sound moves between the day's start and target in the site's pronunciation graph of 371 prepared ladders. This applies to the site's graph. Beating par is impossible; matching it means you found a shortest route. Detours cost one hop each and never strand you: every puzzle is checked to have at least three distinct shortest routes. The words in parentheses are friendly respellings of each pronunciation, written in plain letter groups rather than dictionary symbols.
Pronunciations: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (cmusphinx/cmudict), available under BSD-2-Clause. Stress marks are stripped and identical-sounding words share one node.
For a reproducible account of that graph, including its node and edge counts, construction rule, limitations, checksums, reusable figures and a bounded JSON sample, see the Echoes pronunciation graph research release.