Newly Minted

What is Newly Minted?

Newly Minted is a free daily word-history game built from Google Books Ngram data. Every day the site shows you five words, one at a time, each with a category label such as tech, food or slang, and asks the same question for each: in what year did this word take off in books? Type a year from 1800 to 2022 or drag the slider, lock it in, and see how close you landed against the word’s real take-off year. Each word is worth up to 100 points, for a best possible score of 500. Everyone plays the same five words on the same day, and a new set unlocks at midnight in your own time zone.

How scoring works

Scoring rewards a close year, not an exact one. A guess within 2 years of the take-off year, in either direction, earns the full 100 points. Points then fall steadily with every extra year and reach zero once you are 25 years off: 5 years out is worth 87 points, 10 years out is worth 65 and 20 years out is worth 22. Guessing too early costs exactly as much as guessing too late, so there is never a reason to lean one way. Each word is marked 🔵 Nailed it for 90 points or more, 🟠 Close for 50 to 89 points, or ⚪ Miss for anything lower, and the same three colors make up the row of dots in your shared result.

What “took off” means

A word’s take-off year is not the year somebody first wrote or said it. It is the year its use in printed books started to climb and kept climbing. To find it, Newly Minted takes how common the word is in English-language books, year by year from 1800 to 2022, measured against everything printed that year, and smooths it with a five-year average so one odd year cannot distort the picture. It then finds the word’s peak, draws a line at a tenth of the height of that peak, and looks for the last time before the peak that the smoothed curve rises up through the line. That year is the answer. A word that flickered in one decade and fell back does not count; it took off when it rose and stayed risen.

Because the source is printed books, and books trail speech by years, a word you remember hearing in conversation can take off in print later than you would guess. The data and method page has the full rule, its limits and the reason the game’s year is not the same as a dictionary’s first known use.

Fair play and streaks

Each word offers one optional hint: a 20-year window that always contains the take-off year but is never centered on it. Taking a free hint adds a small light bulb to your shared result; watching a short optional ad reveals the same window without it, so friends can tell a clean solve from an assisted one. After you lock in a guess, the reveal draws the word’s curve since 1800, with its take-off year and your guess both marked. The five words for each day are chosen in advance and never change once that puzzle is live, and they always span eras: exactly one took off in 1990 or later, at least one took off in 1929 or earlier, and no more than two share a category. Finishing the daily puzzle on consecutive days builds your streak, and everything — your streak, your history and your hint use — lives in your browser rather than an account, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to lose except by clearing your own site data.