About Break 5

Break 5 - a five-letter word ladder you can play in a five-minute break.

Every day at midnight (UK time) a new puzzle appears: two five-letter words. Turn the first into the second by changing one letter at a time, where every rung of the ladder is a real English word. Everyone gets the same puzzle, and the ten fastest solvers make the day's leaderboard.

How to play

• Press Play. The clock starts the moment the words are revealed. Finish within 5 minutes to earn the Broke 5 badge.
• Change exactly one letter to make a new, real word. Type the whole word - the fifth letter submits it.
• Reach the target word. Fastest time wins; fewer steps break ties.
• Par is the best route using common words only, so it's always achievable with vocabulary you know. Shortest is the shortest possible route once obscure words are allowed, shown only when it beats par; we reveal both once you've finished. Beating par is a flex; you don't have to.
• Made a wrong turn? Undo removes your last rung (the clock keeps running).

Fair play

Times are measured on our server from reveal to finish, so nothing on your device can shave seconds off. Only signed-in players are ranked, one account per email. Suspiciously fast results are held back for review.

No nonsense

No tracking, no cookie banner, no third party ad networks. Fonts, scripts and game assets are served from break5.co.uk itself, and any ads you see are served by us from our own server. The one exception is the bot check on the sign-up form, which comes from Cloudflare (see Privacy). The game loads fast and nobody follows you around the internet.

Credits

Set in Fredoka and Nunito (SIL Open Font License), served from our own server. The dictionary is built on SCOWL by Kevin Atkinson and others. Word meanings are adapted from Wiktionary, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence; every definition links to its Wiktionary page.

Dictionary

We use our own list of around 8,000 five-letter English words (built from the SCOWL and ENABLE word lists, checked against Wiktionary). Unusual words carry a small "?": tap or hover to see what they mean, so you can check an unfamiliar rung is real. For any other word, long-press it (or double-click on a computer). Real words that are slurs or crude are deliberately left out: enter one and we'll tell you it's not allowed rather than pretend it doesn't exist. Think a word is missing or shouldn't be there? Let us know.