Languages

Your language decides the prompts you get, the words that count, and the list your finds go into. The room picks one, or the host turns on Multi Language and everyone picks their own.

Overview

English

English started as a Germanic language, then spent centuries absorbing French and Latin after the Norman conquest. That is why so many ideas have two words, one plain and one formal, like ask and inquire or begin and commence. Roughly half the dictionary was borrowed from somewhere else.

Almost every prompt has hundreds of answers, so this is the softest place to learn the game.

• Read more about English on Wikipedia

Portuguese

Portuguese kept a set of nasal vowels that its Romance siblings lost, written with a tilde in ã and õ. Brazil holds the large majority of speakers, so the Brazilian spelling and vocabulary is what you will meet most often.

Verb endings do most of the work, so one root turns into dozens of answers and a prompt that lands mid verb is usually free.

• Read more about Portuguese on Wikipedia

Turkish

Turkish is agglutinative, so suffixes stack onto a root one after another until a single word says what English needs a whole sentence for. Vowel harmony decides which version of each suffix shows up.

It also has dotted and dotless i, four letters in total: i, ı, İ and I. Uppercase i is İ here, so I and İ are genuinely different letters and never swap for each other.

Suffixes stack, so a root you already know can be stretched into a longer word that still fits the prompt.

• Read more about Turkish on Wikipedia

French

French is official in 29 countries and famous for letters it refuses to say out loud. Most final consonants stay silent, so the spelling preserves history that the spoken language dropped centuries ago.

Accents matter in writing: é, è, ê, ç and the rest are part of the word, not decoration.

Verb endings carry the list, so a prompt sitting inside a common infinitive has hundreds of answers.

• Read more about French on Wikipedia

Spanish

Spanish is the second most spoken native language on the planet and one of the most consistent to spell. If you can say a word you can usually write it, because the letters map to sounds with very few surprises.

The alphabet has 27 letters thanks to ñ, which counts as its own letter rather than an n with a mark on top.

Verb endings dominate the list, so prompts that land on one have a huge pool of answers.

• Read more about Spanish on Wikipedia

Filipino

Filipino is the standardised form of Tagalog and the national language of the Philippines. Centuries of Spanish rule left thousands of loanwords behind, and English keeps adding more.

Repeating a word is real grammar here rather than a typo, as in araw araw meaning every day, so reduplicated forms are everywhere.

Prefixes and infixes reshape a small set of roots, so a prompt buried in the middle of a root still has plenty of answers.

• Read more about Filipino on Wikipedia

German

German capitalises every noun, and nouns glue together into compounds as long as you need them to be.

Compounds are the trick here. If a prompt looks impossible on its own, glue a bigger noun around it and it usually works.

• Read more about German on Wikipedia

Italian

Italian is the living language closest to Latin, and nearly every word ends in a vowel.

The native alphabet only has 21 letters. J, k, w, x and y exist but show up almost exclusively in borrowed words.

Nearly every word ends in a vowel, so the prompts that hurt are the ones ending on a consonant cluster.

• Read more about Italian on Wikipedia

Indonesian

Indonesian is a standardised form of Malay and one of the friendliest languages here for a newcomer. There are no verb tenses, no grammatical gender and no cases to memorise.

Plurals are often made by simply saying the word twice, and prefixes and suffixes build new words from a small set of roots.

Roots are short and the prefixes do the rest, so a prompt usually shows up somewhere in the middle of a built up word.

• Read more about Indonesian on Wikipedia

Swedish

Swedish has a pitch accent, so two words spelled the same can mean different things depending on the melody you use. Spelling does not show it.

The alphabet ends with å, ä and ö rather than sorting them near a and o.

Compounds run long here, so a prompt buried in the middle of a word is usually still reachable.

• Read more about Swedish on Wikipedia

Russian

Russian uses a 33 letter Cyrillic alphabet, and two of those letters, ь and ъ, make no sound of their own. They only change how the letters around them are pronounced.

Six grammatical cases mean a single noun wears a lot of different endings.

Case endings mean one noun gives you a pile of answers, so getting the root is most of the work.

• Read more about Russian on Wikipedia

Catalan

Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands and Andorra, where it is the only official language. It came out of Latin on its own path rather than out of Spanish.

It has a punctuation mark almost nobody else uses, the interpunct in l·l, which keeps a double l from being read as the ll sound.

Verb and plural endings carry the list, so prompts that land on one have a huge pool of answers.

• Read more about Catalan on Wikipedia

Arabic

Arabic is written right to left and builds words from three consonant roots. From k t b you get kataba for he wrote, kitab for book and maktab for office, so word families are extremely easy to spot once you know the pattern.

Letters change shape depending on where they sit in the word.

Words are built from three consonant roots, so once a prompt matches a root you get the whole family with it. A word you end in ه is retried with ة if the first spelling misses.

• Read more about Arabic on Wikipedia

Finnish

Finnish is not Indo European at all, so it shares almost no roots with the languages around it. Instead of prepositions it has 15 grammatical cases that attach to the end of the word.

Vowel and consonant length changes meaning outright: tuli is fire, tuuli is wind, tulli is customs. Doubling a letter is never optional here.

Cases attach to the end of the word, so one root turns into a long tail of answers.

• Read more about Finnish on Wikipedia

Dutch

Dutch sits between English and German. It compounds like German but keeps a simpler case system, closer to English.

The pair ij behaves like a single letter, and both halves get capitalised at the start of a word, as in IJsland.

Compounds work the way they do in German, so wrapping a bigger word around an awkward prompt usually gets you out.

• Read more about Dutch on Wikipedia

Romanian

Romanian is the only Eastern Romance language with national status. It kept its Latin core while surrounded by Slavic neighbours for over a thousand years, so the vocabulary is a genuine mix.

It adds ă, â, î, ș and ț to the Latin alphabet, and unusually for a Romance language it puts the definite article on the end of the noun.

The definite article rides on the end of the noun, so a lot of answers differ only in their last few letters.

• Read more about Romanian on Wikipedia

Polish

Polish runs on consonant clusters. Sequences like szcz and prz look impossible on paper, but each one is only a sound or two.

It kept two nasal vowels, ą and ę, that most Slavic languages lost, and it runs on seven grammatical cases.

Seven cases on top of one of the largest lists in the game mean most prompts have thousands of answers.

• Read more about Polish on Wikipedia

Greek

Greek is the oldest documented living Indo European language, with written records going back more than 3400 years. A lot of scientific vocabulary in every other language here was borrowed from it.

Its 24 letter alphabet has a special final sigma, ς, used only at the end of a word, so the same sound has two shapes.

Endings shift with case and number, so one root covers a lot of answers.

• Read more about Greek on Wikipedia

Ukrainian

Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic but with letters Russian does not have, including ї, є and ґ, and it uses і where Russian uses и.

It is one of the few Slavic languages where the vocative case is still part of everyday speech, so names change form when you call out to someone.

Case endings pile up the way they do in Russian, so a root you know usually covers several answers at once.

• Read more about Ukrainian on Wikipedia

Czech

The háček, the little v over č, š and ž, was invented for Czech and later borrowed by half of Europe. The alphabet counts 42 letters because those marked letters and the digraph ch each count on their own.

Syllabic consonants let whole words run without a vowel.

Cases give every noun a dozen shapes, which is why this is one of the largest lists in the game.

• Read more about Czech on Wikipedia

Hindi

Hindi is written in Devanagari, where letters hang from a horizontal line instead of sitting on one. Vowels attach to consonants as marks, so a written syllable is a single connected unit.

Prompts are cut on whole written syllables rather than single letters, so what you see in the bomb is always a unit you can say.

• Read more about Hindi on Wikipedia

Welsh

Welsh changes the first letter of a word depending on grammar, so the same word can start three different ways. Learning to spot mutations is most of the battle for a beginner.

Pairs like ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th each count as one letter, which is why the alphabet is 29 letters long and why w and y are vowels here.

Digraphs like CH, DD and LL are one letter in Welsh but two in a prompt, which is why CH turns up in such a huge slice of the list.

• Read more about Welsh on Wikipedia

Japanese

Japanese writes with three scripts at once. Hiragana carries grammar, katakana carries loanwords, and kanji carries meaning, and a normal sentence uses all three.

Prompts are cut on mora boundaries, so a small kana never gets split off the kana it belongs to. Katakana you type gets folded to hiragana before it is checked.

• Read more about Japanese on Wikipedia

Moderators

Players who volunteer to review word suggestions for a language. Open a language above to see who moderates it.

Languages with nobody on them are open. Ask in the Discord if you want to take one.

• Word Bomb Discord