📜 Gridogram Blah

Assorted thoughts and notes on Gridogram.

☀️ Play Today’s Gridogram

Weekly Schedule

The hidden quote has a different theme each day:

• 🎵 Music Monday (song titles, lyrics)
• 🐶 Top Dog Tuesday (leaders, sports)
• 🃏 Wildcard Wednesday (anything goes!)
• 🤔 Thursday of Thought (philosophy, religion, science)
• 📚 Friday Book Club (literature, plays, poems)
• 📺 Screen Time Saturday (TV, film)
• 🥠 Sunday Sayings (aphorisms, proverbs)

Playing

How do players enjoy their daily Gridogram?

⏱️ Some players go for speed. Frantically swiping as many short words as possible to corner the gold words in the alphabetical list, they then pounce on them.

🎏 Some players go for speed with a more methodical approach. They box in and find the first gold word in the alphabetical list, then move on to the second one, and so on... skipping any they can’t get quickly to come back to at the end.

🧘 Some players prefer a relaxed approach. They solve the grid in whatever time it takes, maybe doing something else at the same time, maybe putting the grid aside and coming back to it at different times during the day.

🎯 Some players go for accuracy. They solve the Gridogram using a minimum number of words, by analysing the grid letters, the position of the gold words in the alphabetical list, and the quote placeholders.

🕵🏻 Some players like to keep finding words after solving the daily quote. Some target getting half of all available words every day. The most words ever found is 500 (Gridogram 2025-08-09, out of a possible 579). Sometimes all the words are found! The record is all 394 words being found in Gridogram 2025-08-31.

Competing

Gridogram does not have a built-in mechanism to rank players. This would mean players having to set up accounts, which shouldn’t be necessary for a fun casual daily game. Players can however see a graph of how their anonymous stats compare to the rest of the world:

Beyond that, the way players can compete is with friends, by sharing in a group chat how they did on the daily grid:

This seems to work well when sharing in WhatsApp group chats, emails, and online forums. Some people compete on speed, others on accuracy — no metric is paramount. And some folk don’t care much for competing, but do occasionally share their thoughts on the quote.

It’s naturally possible to get an impressive result by doing the daily Gridogram on one device, and then doing the same quote again on another... But therein lies no glory.

Quotes

How are Gridogram quotes selected?

When a player discovers the hidden quote, it should make them smile, think, remember or feel something.

Some quotes are well-known, some more obscure. But the preference is for well-known ones. Players get a warm glow from recognising a quote early and solving the grid more easily, that’s a good thing.

Preference is for quotes without proper nouns, but they can feature in well-known quotes.

If a quote is too lengthy, it can’t go in a Gridogram. The aim is to keep grids at max 5ｘ4 letters, but occasionally a quote that requires a more challenging 5ｘ5 grid makes the cut.

Common misquotations are avoided. Darth Vader said “No, I am your father”, not “Luke, I am your father”. Sometimes primary sources can be fun to check.

A substantial effort is made to ensure quotes are attributed to an original source. A Gridogram with the lines But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can! would cite Thinking by Walter D. Wintle. Derivatives like “Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can”, with different attributions, are avoided.

Quotes only use words a majority of people will recognise. Which rules out much of Robert Burns, and that is just a shame. Gridogram will have no “Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie”. 🐁

When alternative spellings are possible, quotes stick to their origin. 🇬🇧 Quotes originally in British English or said by a British person use British spelling. 🇺🇸 Quotes originally in American English or said by an American use American spelling.

Bridges are crossed as they are encountered... The Steve Irwin 🇦🇺 Gridogram didn’t have any ambiguous spelling!

Words

The Gridogram wordlist includes common and uncommon English words, with both American and British English spellings.

Part of the fun can be discovering new words: which did you miss in the grid? So the wordlist requires some curation. Seeing you missed a word nobody’s uttered in the last century isn’t very interesting.

What is a valid word in Gridogram world?

The original English words came from the open-source Wordnik Wordlist. As new Gridograms are created, any missing words are added to the list (e.g. “gilets”), and words with no valid definitions on Wiktionary are removed (e.g. “compt”). As of writing there are 191,557 valid words.

What do you mean by “valid definition”?

Each word has an entry on Wiktionary. A word is excluded if all its English definitions are labelled as one of:

• Obsolete spelling: escarp, oaker...
• Archaic spelling: caldron, incumber...
• Dated spelling: gaol, goodby...
• Early Modern spelling: unce...
• Eye dialect: omigod, sez...
• Informal spelling: thoro, awfy...
• Nonstandard spelling: kewl, wintery...
• Pronunciation spelling: furder, gawd...
• Rare spelling: terf, bosque...
• Alternative spelling: gasolene, lavolt...
• Misspelling: momento, weiner...
• Abbreviation: doco...
• Contraction: hafta...
• Alternative letter-case: Braille (keeping instead braille)...
• Regional or dialectal: crabbit (Scotland), bruce (Australia), haint (US, dialectal)...

Those are the general principles established so far, aiming to create a modern international English wordlist. There will naturally be exceptions, like if a quote uses a contraction, that contraction has to be an accepted word. After all, international phenomenon Rick Astley can’t be quoted without “gonna”.

Creating a Gridogram

All the words in the following quote can fit, Boggle-style, in a 4ｘ4 grid:

Space is to place as eternity is to time.

Try it yourself: set letters in the grid so that all words in the above quote are underlined. One cell can even be left blank, there are multiple solutions.

▶️ See & Play a Solution

The first Gridograms were created with pencil and paper, trial and error, using heuristics you may have discovered when filling in the grid above. It’s kind of a fun exercise, a little like sudoku.

But how did we know that a 4ｘ4 grid was the right size for the quote?

Estimating Grid Size

Take the letters used in “Space is to place as eternity is to time.”, noting that T and E are needed twice to spell “eternity”:

ACEEILMNOPRSTTY

That’s 15 letters, and for this quote 15 is also the actual number of cells needed. We use 4ｘ4 rather than 5ｘ3 to keep Gridograms near square, as 𝑛ｘ𝑛 or 𝑛ｘ𝑛−1.

Often, however, this counting exercise only provides a lower bound, not the exact number of cells needed. Let’s try another quote:

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.

Letters used:

ADEEGHIJKNOSTUVY

That’s 16 letters, so another 4ｘ4 grid? Nope, that won’t be big enough to include all the words in the quote. Can you figure out a reason why? (I’ll come back to this.)

So why can’t “Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it” fit in a 4ｘ4 grid? Hint: look at those underlined letters.

Cells in a grid corner connect with 3 others. Cells along an edge connect with 5. Cells away from the edges have the most connections: 8.

The letter N in the quote is very friendly: it wants to be next to A, D, E, I, J, K, O, S, and U. That’s 9 different letters, more adjacencies than one grid cell can have!

So the grid will need more than one N. Updating the letter list to ADEEGHIJKNNOSTUVY gives us a new lower bound of 17 letters. The quote does indeed fit in a 5ｘ4 grid, you can try to create one below (3 cells can be left blank).

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.

▶️ See & Play a Solution

How can we programmatically take account of cases like this quote, to better estimate grid size? With undirected graphs!

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[1]: The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (A236690). Even getting a count for how many paths exist is not trivial. I wrote a naive Fortran program (new language for me, wanted to try it) to exhaustively count the paths for 2ｘ2 (64), 3ｘ3 (10,305), and 4ｘ4 (12,029,640) grids. 5ｘ5 was taking some time to compute, fortunately pasting the path counts for smaller grids in Google led me to the OEIS.