Spelling Riddle – Think Spellbee with crossword clue and visual hint

I wanted a daily spelling game that tested semantic knowledge rather than vocab, and a riddle game with both text and visual hints. So I combined them.

Each day you get 9 letters and up to 15 hidden words to find. Every word has two orthogonal clues: a text hint and a image hint. The hints are crossword puzzle style — you need to figure out what the clues are pointing at, then spell it.

The site is fully static.

## How the clues get made

The pipeline has three stages:

1. Dictionary curation — Start from raw word lists, normalize, dedupe, filter plurals/profanity, and add frequency data.

2. Word quality tournament — Words are ranked for puzzle suitability using grouped LLM matches in a Swiss-style tournament. Performance is converted to a 0–100 quality rating using Wilson lower-bound scoring.

3. Hint generation — For each puzzle word set, generate multiple text + image hint candidates, lint-filter weak ones (e.g. text hints that contain the answer, image prompts that would render as text), rank the survivors, then generate the final images.

Text hints: GPT 5.2, Image hints: Qwen Image.

The clue generation is the hardest part and still not perfect (though model improvements might make it trivial soon).