Newly Minted FAQ

Yes. Newly Minted is a free daily word-history game: each day you guess the year five words took off in books, using Google Books Ngram data from 1800 to 2022. Each word is worth up to 100 points, for 500 in total.

It is a free tool from Google that charts how often words and phrases appear in a large collection of digitized printed books, year by year. Newly Minted uses its English corpus (2022), from 1800 to 2022, under the CC BY 3.0 license. It counts printed books, not speech or the web, which is why a word can take off in books years after people start saying it. Newly Minted is not affiliated with Google.

A dictionary’s first known use is the earliest written record of a word that its editors can find, sometimes a single sentence in a letter. Newly Minted dates something else: the year a word’s use in printed books began a lasting climb. Books trail speech and the web, so the game’s year usually lands later than a first known use, sometimes by decades. The five-year smoothing can work the other way for a word that arrives in a single burst, dating it up to about two years early.

Read the word and its category, type a year from 1800 to 2022 or drag the slider, and press Lock in. The reveal shows the year the word took off in books, your score out of 100 and the word’s curve since 1800. After five words you have a total out of 500. One optional hint per word reveals a 20-year window that contains the answer.

It is the last year before a word’s peak in which its five-year smoothed use in English-language books rises up through a tenth of the peak’s height. In plain words, it is the year the word’s use began a lasting climb in print, not the year anyone first wrote or said it.

Each of the five words is worth up to 100 points, for 500 in total. A guess within 2 years of the take-off year earns full points; points fall steadily from there and reach zero once you are 25 years off, in either direction. For example, 5 years off scores 87 and 10 years off scores 65.

Because a word’s take-off can only be measured once books have caught up with it. Newly Minted uses words that took off between 1820 and 2019. A word that takes off after 2019 may still be climbing when the data ends in 2022, so its peak, and therefore its take-off, cannot be measured yet. The newest words are left out until the data can show where they are heading.

Because Newly Minted measures printed books, which trail speech, often by years. A word usually spends time in conversation, songs, newspapers and on the web before enough books use it to register. The hashtag is an example: Twitter users were using hashtags by 2007, but “hashtag” took off in books in 2011. When you remember the year you first heard a word, treat it as the earliest the answer is likely to be and guess later.

Because take-off is measured against a word’s own peak, and a word that kept growing for a century has a very high, very late peak. A tenth of that peak is reached late, long after the word was in everyday use. “Protein” took off in 1907 and peaked in 2011; “electron” took off in 1936 and peaked in 1967. The strategy guide explains how to guess words like these.

The pool has 1,105 words in eight categories: tech, science, slang, culture, politics, business, food and health. Every one took off between 1820 and 2019. Each day’s five always include one word that took off in 1990 or later and at least one that took off in 1929 or earlier, and no word repeats within 150 days.

A new set of five words unlocks at midnight in your own time zone. Everyone gets the same five words on the same calendar day.

No. Hints never break a streak. A free hint reveals a 20-year window containing the take-off year and adds a light bulb to your shared result; a hint unlocked by watching an optional ad reveals the same window without one.

Unlimited mode is an Earlier or Later run. You see one known word with its take-off year and one hidden word, and you call whether the hidden word took off earlier or later. The two words are always at least 5 years apart. Each right call keeps the run going; a wrong call ends it.

Yes. The archive lists every past daily puzzle. Archive rounds count toward your statistics, but only today’s puzzle extends your streak.

Yes. The daily puzzle, the archive and unlimited mode are all free to play, with no account required.

Newly Minted is made by Guessday, an independent site of original daily guessing games. It is not affiliated with Google.