Echoes
The daily sound-ladder. Walk from the start word to the target by changing one sound per move — spelling doesn't matter, and hops between identical-sounding words are free.
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Undo is free. A hint reveals one next hop and adds a hint mark to your result — one reveal at a time.
You made it
🟩 hop toward the target on a shortest route · 🟨 detour hop · ◯ free homophone flourish · • hint used
Show one par route
One shortest route through the graph — there are always others:
What counts as one sound
Echoes runs on pronunciations, not spellings. Every word is mapped to its primary 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.
Spelling can move a long way while the sound barely moves. 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 DOUGH to DOE is free
Both spellings share the pronunciation DOH, so hopping between them changes zero sounds. Echoes marks it as a flourish — celebrated, never charged.
Par is the fewest one-sound moves between the day's start and target in the site's pronunciation graph of 371 prepared ladders — a fact about this graph, not a claim about English at large. 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.